Numbers 7:63

Summary

Numbers 7:63 lists three sacrificial animals presented as part of a tribal offering: one young bull, one ram, and one male lamb one year old, all designated for a burnt offering.

Key words

• par ("a young bull", H6499) — masculine singular noun naming the first animal in the list.
• ben ("a young one of", H1121) — construct noun used twice in this verse; here it links par to baqar, marking the bull as belonging to the category "cattle."
• 'e.Chad ("one", H0259) — cardinal number repeated three times, once after each animal noun, explicitly enumerating a single specimen of each kind.
• ben...shanat-o ("son of his year", H1121/H8141) — a construct chain plus pronominal suffix (H9023) forming an idiom meaning "one year old," describing the lamb's age.
• le-'olah ("for a burnt offering", H9005/H5930A) — preposition le ("to/for") prefixed to 'olah, stating the purpose of the whole offering.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is a simple enumerated list with no verb: three nouns for sacrificial animals (par, 'ayil, kadesh), each immediately followed by the numeral 'e.Chad ("one"). This repetition of 'e.Chad after every noun is a structural feature of the Hebrew — it does not merely say "a bull, a ram, a lamb" but explicitly counts "one bull, one ram, one lamb," emphasizing single specimens rather than groups.

The phrase ben baqar ("a young one of cattle") uses the construct state to specify that the par belongs to the category of baqar ("cattle"), a common way in Biblical Hebrew to qualify an animal's kind. Similarly, the lamb's age is expressed not with a simple adjective but through the construct chain ben shenato ("son of his year"), literally "son of his year," an idiomatic construction indicating an animal that has completed one year of life. The final word le-'olah attaches the preposition le directly to 'olah, indicating the destination or function of these three animals together as a single burnt offering.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew repeats 'e.Chad ("one") after each animal noun, and the LXX preserves this with ἕνα after μόσχον and κριὸν, though it renders ben baqar as ἐκ βοῶν ("from oxen") rather than a construct-noun equivalent. The Vulgate drops the explicit numeral "one" for the bull and ram (bovem de armento, et arietem), relying on the singular noun form alone to convey a single animal, while RV1909 and SBLIBRE restore "un" before each animal, matching the Hebrew's threefold repetition. For the lamb's age, the Hebrew idiom ben shenato ("son of his year") is rendered by a single adjective in both LXX (ἐνιαύσιον) and Vulgate (anniculum), collapsing the construct-chain idiom into one word.