Numbers 7:23

Summary

The verse lists the animals offered by Nethanel son of Zuar as the zevach ha-shelamim ("sacrifice of the peace offerings", H2077/H8002): two oxen, five rams, five goats, and five year-old lambs. It closes by identifying this list as his qorban ("offering", H7133A).

Key words

• Ze.vach ("sacrifice of", H2077) — masculine singular construct, linking directly to ha-shelamim, forming the technical term for the well-being/peace sacrifice.
• she.la.Mim ("peace offerings", H8002) — masculine plural with definite article, naming the specific sacrificial category to which the animals belong.
• be.nei- ("sons of", H1121H) — masculine plural construct, used idiomatically with shanah ("a year", H8141) to express age ("sons of a year" = one-year-old animals).
• ka.re.Ban ("offering of", H7133A) — masculine singular construct, summarizing the entire preceding list as a single formal "offering" attributed to Nethanel.
• cha.mi.Shah ("five", H2568) — cardinal number repeated three times, each time governing a different animal noun (rams, goats, lambs), showing the numeral follows rather than precedes the counted noun in this construction.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a list embedded in a construct chain. It opens with u-le-zevach ha-shelamim ("and for the sacrifice of the peace offerings"), establishing the category of offering before naming the animals themselves. The animals then follow in sequence — baqar shenayim ("oxen, two"), eilim chamishah ("rams, five"), atudim chamishah ("goats, five"), kevasim benei-shanah chamishah ("lambs, sons of a year, five") — with each numeral placed after its noun, a pattern typical of Biblical Hebrew enumerations rather than the number-first order familiar from English.

The phrase benei shanah ("sons of a year", H1121H + H8141) is a construct idiom specifying age, not literal offspring; it marks the lambs as one-year-old animals, a detail some translations render adjectivally ("year-old lambs") while the Hebrew phrasing is genitival ("sons of a year").

The verse closes with a summary clause, zeh qorban Netan'el ben-Tzu'ar ("this [is] the offering of Nethanel, son of Zuar"), where the demonstrative zeh ("this", H2088) points back to the entire list just given, and qorban (construct, H7133A) frames all the itemized animals as a single unified "offering" attributed by genealogy to Nethanel son of Zuar.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders shelamim ("peace offerings", H8002) as σωτηρίου ("of salvation/deliverance"), a translation choice that shifts the semantic emphasis from "peace/well-being" to "salvation," differing from the Hebrew term's more general sense of well-being offerings. The Vulgate's pacificorum ("of peace offerings") stays closer to the Hebrew concept of peace. The Vulgate also spells the father's name Suar rather than Zuar, matching the LXX's Σωγάρ more closely in form than the Hebrew Tzu'ar.