DEDICATION — from chanak, 'to train up, dedicate, initiate into use.' Its most familiar English appearance is nowhere on these pages yet: a child 'trained up' in the way he should go (Proverbs 22:6, not yet on these pages) uses the same root, dedicating a young life to a path the way this chapter dedicates an altar to a use. Numbers 7 names the whole twelve-day ceremony chanukkat ha-mizbe'ach, 'the dedication of the altar' (vv10, 11, 84, 88, already on these pages) — the word's first appearance in the Bible, and the direct ancestor of the festival name HANUKKAH, which centuries later would commemorate a very different altar's re-dedication after its desecration by the Seleucids (1 Maccabees 4, outside this project's translated canon). A new house gets the same word (Deuteronomy 20:5, not yet on these pages); so does Solomon's temple (1 Kings 8, not yet on these pages) and Psalm 30's own superscription, 'a song at the dedication of the house.' One root, spanning a boy's education, a family's new home, and a nation's holiest building. → first discussed at Num 7:10