What Does Numbers 29:3 Mean?

And their gift is flour mingled with oil; three tenths for a bull, and two tenths for one ram.

Numbers 29:3 · SDV

Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.

Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.

This verse in the King James

King James wording

King James Version

And their meat offering shall be of flour mingled with oil, three tenth deals for a bullock, and two tenth deals for a ram,

THE KEY

The Hebrew root behind mingled also describes the confounding of speech at Babel: mixture can join ingredients or disrupt understanding.

THE MEANING

The verse gives the offering a precise, material form: flour mingled with oil, measured as three tenths for the bull and two for the ram. Its details hold together mixture and proportion, so the offering is described in particulars rather than left abstract.

THE ROOT

בְּלוּלָה

belulah

GROWS FROM

בלל

Mix, mingle, or confound.

“mingled” in this verse is belulah. The same Hebrew root describes flour mixed with oil here and language confounded in Genesis 11:7. English gives these different outcomes separate words, while Hebrew holds both in the act of mixing.

ALSO GROWS

balal: Mix, mingle, or confound.

בָּלַל

In Genesis 11:7, this verb describes the confounding of language until people cannot understand one another.

belulah: Mingled, mixed.

בְּלוּלָה

This is the form used for the fine flour in this verse; it names the joining of the ingredients.

שֶׁמֶן

shemen

GROWS FROM

שמן

Be fat or grow rich; the noun names oil.

The Hebrew word for oil belongs to a root family that also describes fatness and richness. The offering’s oil is a concrete ingredient, while its word-family carries the added sense of richness.

ALSO GROWS

shamen: Grow fat, become rich.

שָׁמֵן

Deuteronomy 32:15 uses a form of this verb for Jeshurun growing fat; the shared consonants connect the condition of richness with the word for oil.

shemenah: Fat, rich.

שְׁמֵנָה

Genesis 49:20 uses this form to describe rich bread, extending the root’s material sense of richness into food.

THE PATTERN

An offering takes concrete form through both measured quantity and prepared mixture.

With the one lamb, a tenth of an ephah of fine flour mixed with a fourth of a hin of crushed oil, and a fourth of a hin of wine for a poured offering.

Exodus 29:40 · SDVThe offering is specified through measured portions of flour, oil, and wine.

And if your drawing near is a gift baked on the pan, it is fine flour, unleavened, mixed with oil.

Leviticus 2:5 · SDVThe offering’s form is defined by its flour, preparation, and mixture with oil.

Then he shall bring with the young bull a gift of three tenth measures of flour mixed with half a hin of oil.

Numbers 15:9 · SDVThe flour and oil are measured together in a quantity corresponding to the bull.

THE THREAD

Come, let us go down, and there mix up their lip, so that they may not hear one another's lip and respond.

Genesis 11:7 · SDV

The Hebrew word for mingled here comes from ⁨בלל⁩ (balal), the same root translated confound in Genesis 11:7. In one verse the root joins flour and oil; in the other, mixed language breaks understanding.

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