12–88. This is the one signal
instance in the entire Bible of extensive verbatim repetition without the
slightest variation. (The single exception is that in verses 72 and 78, the
word “day,” yom, is—untranslatably—repeated after the formula “On the xth
day,” a usage perhaps dictated by the fact that the numeration has gone beyond
ten to numbers that are compound in form in the Hebrew. The language in verse
12 reporting the first set of offerings also differs slightly from the formulas
at the beginning of the subsequent eleven sets of offerings, but that is simply
because it introduces the whole series.) Biblical narrative, as we have had
many occasions to see, characteristically deploys significant swerves from
verbatim repetition as it approximately repeats strings of phrases and whole
clauses and sentences. This passage, however, is manifestly not narrative but a
kind of epic inventory. Each of the tribes, here accorded absolutely equal
status before the sanctuary without political hierarchy, brings exactly the
same offering. One can readily imagine that the members of each tribe in the
ancient audience of this text would be expected to relish the sumptuousness of
its own tribal offering exactly equal to all the others, as it hears the
passage read. It is also well to remember that lists and the repetitions they
entail constitute an established literary form with its own aesthetic
pleasures—as, for example, in the catalogue of the ships in the Iliad or
in the cumulative repetitive structures of songs like ḥad Gadya (“An
Only Kid”) and, more apposite to this catalogue of gifts, “The Twelve Days of
Christmas.” The offerings of the tribes encompass animal, vegetable, and
mineral gifts (the sacrificial beasts, the grain offerings, the precious
vessels) and are punctuated by the solemn stipulation of weight and number. All
this is then totaled up in verses 84–88, after the twelve verbatim repetitions.
Baruch Levine notes, moreover, certain similarities in form with various West
Semitic temple inventories that have been uncovered by archaeologists. (In the
Hebrew, for example, the ordinal numbers uncharacteristically follow the nouns
rather than precede them, evidently the set form for temple inventories.) This
entire passage, like almost all of the first ten chapters of Numbers, is the
product of Priestly writers, and it strongly reflects both their professional
concerns and the literary antecedents on which they drew. (Robert Alter, The
Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:500-1)
