eser

This is the ordinary Hebrew word for the number ten. It counts people, animals, years, days, objects, and measures, and it works the way "ten" works in English: a plain quantity. The word changes its shape to agree with what it counts and to fit set phrases (for example, the combining form used with another number to build eleven through nineteen), but the meaning stays the same throughout. There is one sense here, and every occurrence is simply the number ten.

Because ten is the base of the counting system, it does a great deal of practical work in the Bible: ten sons, ten cities, ten years, ten shekels, ten cubits, a tenth of an amount. It also anchors the larger round numbers built from it, such as a hundred (ten tens) and a thousand.

Beyond plain counting, ten carries a quiet sense of fullness or completeness in many passages, which is why it surfaces at memorable moments: the Ten Commandments (literally "the ten words"), the ten generations from Adam to Noah and from Noah to Abraham, the ten plagues on Egypt, and Jacob's complaint that Laban changed his wages ten times, meaning again and again. This resonance is a matter of how the number is used in context, not a separate dictionary meaning. The word itself always just means ten.