“Twelve golden ladles, full of incense, ten each ladle, in the sacred shekel; all the gold of the ladles was one hundred and twenty” (Numbers 7:86). “Twelve golden ladles…” – why is it stated? It is because it says: “One gold ladle of ten shekels” (Numbers 7:14) but you do not know whether it is gold and its weight is silver, or is it of silver and its weight is of gold.103The question is whether the word gold is describing the material from which the ladle is made, or is describing the weight, i.e., the weight of ten gold units of volume, rather than the weight of ten silver identical units, presuming that the gold weight differs from the silver weight.
When it says: “All the gold of the ladles was one hundred and twenty,” you should not say like the latter formulation, but rather according to the former formulation. They ascribe to each and every one of them that he presented an offering of twelve ladles, and these were the ones that they donated and no disqualification befell them.