Three lines, each longer than the last, and God’s name in every one. It ends with شالوم.

العددLine 1Line 2Line 3

Numbers 6:24–26 كتاب بيريان القياسي (Berean Standard Bible)

Tap any word to see the Hebrew behind it.

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The blessing puts God’s name on his people

The LORD gave Aaron and his sons these words to speak over Israel, and said what speaking them does. In Hebrew every “you” in the blessing is singular.

The oldest known copy of a Bible text is this blessing

In 1979 two small silver scrolls were found at Ketef Hinnom in Jerusalem, with a form of this blessing scratched into them. The scholars who re-read them in 2004 date them to the years before Babylon took Jerusalem in 586 BC. They call them the earliest known quotations of any text that is also in the Hebrew Bible.

G. Barkay, M. J. Lundberg, A. G. Vaughn and B. Zuckerman, “The Amulets from Ketef Hinnom: A New Edition and Evaluation,” نشرة المدارس الأمريكية للبحوث الشرقية 334 (2004), 41–71

About this view

Numbers 6:24–26, word by word

This view sets out Numbers 6:24–26 in the Berean Standard Bible and joins each English word to the Hebrew word it translates. Tap any word to see the Hebrew behind it, what the dictionary says it means, how the Berean Standard Bible translates it in other places, and every verse in the Old Testament that uses it.

Hebrew fastens small words such as “and”, “to”, “you” and “his” to the front and back of a word, so one Hebrew word often stands for two or three English ones: יְבָרֶכְךָ is “bless you”. We show the Hebrew with its vowel signs but without the marks for chanting.

When we count a word, we count it in the Hebrew of the Westminster Leningrad Codex, by the Strong’s number that the Berean Standard Bible’s tables give it. For the commonest words, such as God’s name, the list stops at the first 250 verses and tells you so.

The meanings are quoted word for word from Brown, Driver and Briggs, قاموس عبري وإنجليزي للعهد القديم (1906), and we checked each one against the printed page. Scholars at Tyndale House wrote the one-word meanings, which come from STEPBible.

In Hebrew, God’s name is written with four letters, يهوه, and we spell it YHWH. The Berean Standard Bible, like most English Bibles, prints it “the LORD”.

Sources and licences

  1. English text, Hebrew text and word tables: The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible, BSB, and its word tables, dedicated to the public domain. bereanbible.com. The Hebrew in the tables is the Westminster Leningrad Codex (public domain, tanach.us).
  2. Meanings: إف. براون، إس. آر. درايفر وسي. إيه. بريجز، قاموس عبري وإنجليزي للعهد القديم (Boston, 1906), public domain. Page images: archive.org. Entries found with the Open Scriptures transcription (github.com/openscriptures/HebrewLexicon).
  3. One-word meanings and dictionary forms: STEPBible-Data, Translators Brief lexicon of Extended Strongs for Hebrew (TBESH), Tyndale House Cambridge and STEPBible.org, CC BY 4.0. stepbible.github.io/STEPBible-Data. We use its glosses and dictionary forms only.
  4. Hebrew type: Noto Serif Hebrew, The Noto Project Authors, SIL Open Font License.
  5. The silver scrolls: G. Barkay, M. J. Lundberg, A. G. Vaughn and B. Zuckerman, “The Amulets from Ketef Hinnom: A New Edition and Evaluation,” نشرة المدارس الأمريكية للبحوث الشرقية 334 (2004), 41–71.

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