Numbers 7:39

Summary

This verse lists three animals designated as a burnt offering: a young bull, a ram, and a one-year-old lamb. Each animal is marked as "one" ('echad, H0259), and the lamb's age is specified through the idiom "son of its year."

Key words

• par ("a young bull", H6499) — masculine singular noun naming the first animal in the offering list.
• 'echad ("one", H0259) — cardinal number repeated three times (positions 2, 6, 8), each time confirming the singular count of the animal just named.
• ben ("a young one of" / "son of", H1121) — appears twice in construct form: once linking par to baqar ("cattle"), forming "a young one of cattle" i.e. a bull from the herd; and again in the phrase ben-shenato, "son of its year."
• shenat ("year", H8141) — construct form of "year," combined with the pronominal suffix -o ("its", H9023) to produce ben-shenato, literally "son of its year," the standard Hebrew idiom for an animal one year old.
• le-'olah ("to/for a burnt offering", H5930A with preposition H9005) — the preposition le- ("to") attached to 'olah ("burnt offering") indicates the purpose for which all three animals listed are designated.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is a simple enumeration without a finite verb: three animals are named in sequence, each followed immediately by the numeral 'echad ("one"), and the whole list is closed by the prepositional phrase le-'olah ("for a burnt offering"), which governs all three items at once. The construct chains are notable: ben-baqar ("a young one of cattle") specifies that the par ("young bull") is drawn from the herd category baqar ("cattle"), while ben-shenato ("son of its year") is an idiomatic construct expression used throughout the Hebrew Bible to indicate an animal's age as one year, rather than stating "one year old" with a separate adjective.

The repeated placement of 'echad after each animal (rather than before, as a normal numeral-noun order might have it) gives the list a rhythmic, itemized quality typical of administrative or ritual inventories, distinguishing each unit individually rather than presenting a collective count.

Differences between versions

The Septuagint (LXX) preserves the threefold repetition of "one" (ἕνα) matching the Hebrew 'echad pattern for the bull, ram, and lamb. The Vulgate, by contrast, omits explicit numerals altogether — "bovem de armento, et arietem, et agnum anniculum" states no count, relying on the singular nouns alone to imply one animal each. For the age expression, the LXX uses the adjective ἐνιαύσιον ("yearling") and the Vulgate uses anniculum ("one-year-old"), both collapsing the Hebrew construct idiom ben-shenato ("son of its year") into a single adjectival term rather than reproducing its construct-chain structure.