A FIXED VALUATION — not a market price but a flat tariff, scaled only by age and sex, that a person's vowed value to the sanctuary is converted into (27:2-8): fifty shekels for a man in his prime, thirty for a woman, sliding down for children and the elderly, with an explicit provision for the poor to have the priest set a lower figure they can actually pay. The word is grammatically addressed to Moses himself — erkekha, 'YOUR valuation' — even though every verse then hands the actual assessment to 'the priest'; the law speaks as if Moses personally fixed the tariff once, for good. Genesis 37:28 (already on these pages) already put this exact number to use: Joseph, seventeen years old, is sold for twenty pieces of silver — precisely this chapter's own fixed valuation for a male between five and twenty. Genesis makes nothing of the coincidence; the price is simply, horribly, correct. → first discussed at Lev 27:2