a lamb: a young sheep and never a goat, male unless the text says otherwise, normally an animal in its first year
At its simplest this word names a young sheep. What sets it apart is not the animal but where the animal turns up: of its roughly 120 appearances, all but a dozen or so stand inside Israel's instructions for worship.
- two lambs every day, one in the morning and one at evening
- two more added on each Sabbath, and seven at each new moon
- seven or more at every appointed festival of the year
- a lamb for a mother's offering after childbirth
- two lambs and a ewe lamb for a person healed of a skin disease
- a lamb and a ewe lamb when a Nazirite completed a vow
In the hands of Israel's priests the word had become less a piece of farming vocabulary than the settled name of a ritual instrument.
Three things narrow it, and they matter to anyone reading a translation. It is a sheep and never a goat, which is why the Passover instructions in Exodus 12 reach for a broader word for a single flock animal (שֶׂה) that allows either species. It is normally male, though the laws can call for a female where the ritual requires one, as in Leviticus 4:32. And it is young: the phrase habitually attached to it, "son of its year," marks an animal inside its first twelve months, old enough to be worth something and young enough to be sound. It is neither the newborn still nursing (טָלֶה) nor the grown breeding ram (אַיִל), both of which Hebrew names with words of their own.
Away from the sanctuary the word does ordinary work. Jacob sorts lambs out of Laban's flocks, the food laws list them among the animals Israel may eat, and the wisdom writers count them as the source of a family's clothing. When the prophets reach for the same animal they are drawing on the picture the altar had already made familiar: Jeremiah calls himself a gentle lamb led away to be killed, and Isaiah sets the wolf beside the lamb to describe a world finally at peace.
Hebrew writes this word two ways, swapping its last two letters (כֶּשֶׂב instead of the usual spelling). The two are one word with one meaning; the rarer spelling turns up mostly where sheep are being listed alongside cattle and goats.
Nuances
Disputed
How narrowly the noun itself fixes the animal's age.
- majorityThe word marks an animal inside its first year, the window running from the eighth day after birth to its first birthday, which is why the legislation adds the phrase "son of its year" wherever the age has to be exact.; HALOT II:460, s.v. כֶּבֶשׂ; DCH IV, s.v. כֶּבֶשׂ; J. Milgrom, Numbers, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: JPS, 1990), 238-39 (excursus 63)
- minorityThe word covers a wider stretch of the animal's youth, on some accounts up to about three years, so it does not by itself mean a yearling unless the context supplies the age.; W. Gesenius, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, trans. E. Robinson (London: Bagster, 1857), 384, s.v.; TDOT VII:43-52, "כֶּבֶשׂ kebes"