What Does Numbers 7:55 Mean?
His offering was one silver dish of the weight of a hundred and thirty shekels, one silver sprinkling bowl of seventy shekels, after the set-apart shekel, both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a gift.
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.
King James wording
King James Version
His offering was one silver charger of the weight of an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering:THE KEY
The Hebrew root behind “mingled” also echoes Babel’s confusion, joining deliberate blending and bewilderment in one word.
THE MEANING
You meet the offering in its measured, material form: silver vessels hold flour joined with oil. The ingredients become one prepared mixture, while their weight and substance remain part of the gift.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The sacred must be detached from material things; here, silver, grain, oil, weight, and preparation all belong within the offering.
THE ROOT
בְּלוּלָה
belulah
GROWS FROM
בלל
To mix or mingle; the same root can also carry the sense of confounding.
English makes “mingled” sound like a cooking detail, but the Hebrew echoes Babel’s “confound.” The root can describe mixture that becomes confusion or ingredients deliberately brought together; here, the mixing is purposeful and makes a prepared offering.
ALSO GROWS
bālal: To mix, mingle, or confound.
בָּלַל
This verb is the root of “mingled” here and is used for the confounding of language at Babel.
Bāvel: Babel; Genesis 11:9 links its name with the verb for confounding.
בָּבֶל
The name carries the same sound-play as “mingled,” revealing a Hebrew connection English renders with different words.
THE PATTERN
Distinct parts can be deliberately joined into one prepared offering or shared whole.
And if your drawing near is a gift baked on the pan, it is fine flour, unleavened, mixed with oil.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.For there is one bread, and we, being many, are one body, since we all share in the one bread.THE THREAD
Therefore its name was called Babel, the mixing, because there the LORD mixed up the lip of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them across the face of all the earth.The same root appears in this verse’s mingling of flour with oil and in Genesis’s “confound” at Babel. Here the mixing makes a prepared offering; at Babel, it makes language unintelligible, so one Hebrew root holds both outcomes.
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