Numbers 7:32

Summary

This verse lists one of the items in a leader's offering during the tribal dedication of the altar: a gold pan or dish weighing ten (shekels), completely filled with incense. It belongs to a fixed formulaic list repeated throughout Numbers 7.

Key words

• kaf ("a pan", H3709I) — feminine singular noun in construct state; grammatically it looks forward to qetoret ("incense") at the end of the verse, meaning literally "a pan of... incense," with intervening words describing its weight and material.
• 'achat ("one", H0259) — feminine cardinal number agreeing with kaf; specifies that a single pan is being described, distinguishing this line from a compiled inventory.
• 'asarah ("ten", H6235) — feminine numeral; states a quantity, but the noun it counts (elsewhere "shekel" in the chapter's formula) is not written here, only implied.
• zahav ("gold", H2091) — masculine singular noun identifying the material of the pan and, contextually, the unit being counted by 'asarah.
• me.le.'ah ("full", H4392) — feminine singular adjective agreeing with kaf, describing the pan as filled with incense.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a construct chain interrupted by descriptive material: kaf ("a pan of...") is grammatically bound to qetoret ("incense") at the very end, but between them the text inserts the count ('achat, "one"), a numeral ('asarah, "ten"), the material (zahav, "gold"), and an adjective (me.le.'ah, "full"). This means the phrase "pan of incense" is split apart by the weight and material description, a compact listing style typical of this repeated inventory in Numbers 7.

A notable feature is that 'asarah ("ten") has no explicit counted noun for weight in this verse — no word for "shekel" appears here, unlike other measurement notices in the chapter that spell it out. The quantity "ten" is left to be understood from the surrounding pattern of the text, with zahav ("gold") supplying the material rather than the unit of weight itself.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text does not include a word for "shekel" in this verse; it says only 'asarah zahav ("ten, gold"), leaving the weight unit implicit. The Vulgate makes this explicit by adding siclos ("shekels": "decem siclos", "ten shekels"), and the English translations (BSB, RV1909, SBLIBRE) likewise insert "shekels" for clarity. The LXX renders the phrase as δέκα χρυσῶν ("ten, of gold"), similarly without a separate word for the weight unit, paralleling the Hebrew's implicit structure rather than the Vulgate's explicit one.