Torah Portion Naso - The Most Famous Blessing in the Bible Is Sitting Inside Something You May Have Never Read
There’s a moment in every service where someone reads the Aaronic blessing out loud, and the room goes quiet in a different way than it was quiet before. Not the polite, waiting-for-it-to-be-over quiet. Something else. That particular hush you get when the words are so old and so loaded that the air in the room actually changes.
“Adonai bless you and keep you.” You may have heard it a hundred times. At weddings, at graduations, in synagogue, at Sunday services where someone says it from memory while looking out at the congregation. But here’s the thing: that blessing didn’t originate as a way to wrap up a service. It was given to a specific family, in a specific context, embedded in one of the most demanding and strange portions in the entire Torah. And when you see what’s around it, the blessing starts to mean something it never quite meant before.
Torah Portion Naso is the longest single Torah portion in the entire Torah, and it is absolutely packed. We’ve got the Levitical assignments finished up, the laws of impurity and restitution, the ordeal of the sotah (a woman suspected of adultery), the Nazirite vow, the Aaronic blessing, and then twelve tribal leaders all bringing identical gifts to the Tabernacle over twelve consecutive days. That last section takes up more than a quarter of the entire passage, and honestly, it may be the most profound part of the whole thing.
But we’re not just reading any of that in isolation. The Haftarah gives us Manoah’s unnamed wife and the birth announcement for Samson, who was a Nazirite from the womb. The Besorah drops us into Mark 13 and Yeshua’s warning about the abomination of desolation. And all of it, when you lay it out, is really one conversation about what it means to be set apart, to be seen by God, and to keep your eyes open in a world that keeps trying to make you blind.
The Torah: Numbers 4:21–7:89
Naso means “lift up” or “take a census.” But, the Hebrew is richer than that. The root nasa means to carry, to elevate, to bear. When God tells Moses to lift up the heads of the Gershonites and Merarites for their census, it’s not just some civic exercise. These were the clans responsible for carrying the Tabernacle itself through the wilderness. Every tent peg, every curtain, every socket and bar and board. The weight of the dwelling place of God rested on their shoulders.
Don’t skip past that. The Levites weren’t the glamorous tribe. They didn’t lead armies. They carried things. And God looked at these porters and said: count them. Name them. Lift their heads.
There’s a pastoral pattern in that worth considering: God doesn’t only account for the ones up front. He counts the ones carrying the structure.
The Sotah and the Nazirite
Then we get two laws that feel like they belong in completely different conversations, but they’re sitting right next to each other on purpose.
First, the sotah, which is the law for a woman suspected of adultery. The husband brings her to the priest, there’s dust from the Tabernacle floor mixed into water, she drinks it, and if she’s guilty, her body shows it. If she’s innocent, she goes free and will bear children. This passage makes modern readers deeply uncomfortable, and it should prompt serious engagement rather than a quick pass.
What’s notable is that it’s placed in the context of holiness in the camp. The community’s integrity, its covenant wholeness, requires that suspicion not be allowed to fester unchallenged. The ritual hands judgment entirely to God. No human verdict, no mob, no execution based on accusation alone.
Immediately following is the Nazirite vow. And this is no accident.
The rabbis noticed the proximity and pointed out that the Nazirite section follows the sotah section to show that witnessing moral collapse is a call to consecration. You see the wreckage that wine and unbridled appetite can produce, and you respond by voluntarily taking on restraint. Not as punishment but as dedication.
The Hebrew word is nazir, from the root nazar, meaning to separate or consecrate. A nazir is someone who has chosen to set themselves apart for God through three visible disciplines: no wine or grape products, no contact with the dead, no cutting of the hair.
That third one is significant because in Hebrew, the same root word nezer also means “crown.” The Nazirite’s uncut hair was literally their crown. Their visible, undeniable, can’t-be-missed sign that they belonged to something beyond themselves.
The vow was open to men and women equally, which was unusual in the ancient world. Any Israelite could choose, for a season or for life, to live in this elevated state of consecration. Not as a priest. As a layperson who had made a choice.
“Speak to Bnei-Yisrael and tell them: When a man or woman makes a special vow, the vow of a Nazirite, to consecrate himself to Adonai...” -- Numbers 6:2 (TLV)
The Aaronic Blessing
After the Nazirite laws, we arrive at what is probably the most widely used piece of Scripture in the history of liturgy. God gives Moses a specific blessing and says: this is what you will tell Aaron and his sons to speak over the people.
“Adonai bless you and keep you! Adonai make His face to shine on you and be gracious to you! Adonai turn His face toward you and grant you shalom!” -- Numbers 6:24-26 (TLV)
Three lines. Each one builds. Blessing and protection. Illumination and grace. Presence and peace.
The Hebrew word for bless here is yevarekhekha, from the root barakh, which also means to kneel. There is something in the concept of divine blessing that involves God in a posture of attentiveness toward the one being blessed. And shamar, to keep, means to guard, to hedge, to watch over carefully.
The second line is about panim, face. God’s face turning toward you was, in the ancient world, everything. Kings turned their faces away from the disgraced. A parent turning their face away from a child was a form of rejection so complete it didn’t need words. For God to turn His face toward you, to make His face shine on you, was to be seen. Fully, favorably, without hiding.
And then shalom. Not the English “peace” that we’ve flattened into a generic greeting. Shalom is wholeness, completeness, nothing missing, nothing broken. It’s a word that carries the whole vision of what a life restored to covenant relationship with God looks like.
Notice what the text says after the blessing is given:
“In this way they are to place My Name over Bnei-Yisrael, and so I will bless them.” -- Numbers 6:27 (TLV)
The priests don’t generate the blessing. They place God’s name. The blessing belongs to God and flows through the priest’s words, not from them. That is not a small distinction.
In traditional Jewish practice, the Aaronic blessing is not read by just anyone. It belongs specifically to the Kohanim, the descendants of Aaron the priest. This is one of the oldest continuously observed practices in Judaism, a ritual that has been performed without interruption from the time of the Tabernacle to the present day.
When a Kohen gives the blessing, called duchaning (from the Hebrew word dukhan, the platform from which the blessing was pronounced), he removes his shoes, washes his hands, faces the congregation, and raises his hands in a specific formation.
The hands are held with thumbs touching, fingers split between the ring and middle fingers to form two V shapes, the Hebrew letter shin, the first letter of Shaddai, one of the names of God. It’s a visual declaration written in the priest’s own hands before a single word is spoken.
This is the gesture you may recognize from popular culture without knowing its origin. Leonard Nimoy, who was Jewish, adapted it for the Vulcan salute after watching Kohanim bless the congregation as a child. He peeked when he wasn’t supposed to. He never forgot it.
During the blessing, the congregation traditionally looks away or covers their eyes. The reason given in Jewish tradition is the weight of the divine presence (Shekhinah) that rests on the hands of the Kohen as he speaks. You are not meant to stare directly into it. There is something here that echoes Moses veiling his face after descending from Sinai, the idea that certain encounters with holiness require a protective posture.
If no Kohen is present in a congregation, a rabbi may recite the blessing, but without the raised hands and without the specific formality of the duchan. The words carry the covenant weight they always have. The hands belong to the priesthood.
In congregations like mine, where a Kohen is present, that blessing is not ceremonial decoration. It is the living continuation of what God commanded Moses in Numbers 6. The same words. The same hands. The same Name placed over the people.
The Chieftains’ Offerings
The last section of the Torah portion is genuinely peculiar in its structure. Each of the twelve tribal leaders brings an identical offering to the dedication of the Tabernacle altar. The same gift, twelve times. And the Torah lists every single one of them individually, in full, with every item named. It would have been so easy to say “each of the twelve leaders brought the following offering” and list it once. That’s not what the text does.
Every chieftain is named. Every offering is recounted in its entirety. All twelve times.
Why? Because in God’s accounting, identical gifts offered by different people are not the same gift. Nahshon son of Amminadab brought his offering. Nethanel son of Zuar brought his. They’re not interchangeable simply because the amounts match. Each act of worship, offered by each particular person, is seen and recorded individually.
The portion ends with Moses entering the Tent of Meeting to speak with God and hearing the voice speaking to him from above the ark. The word used for what Moses heard is kol, voice.
This is the same root word used in Exodus when the people “saw the voices” at Sinai. There’s something about encountering God that consistently breaks down the categories we use to keep our senses separate. You see what you hear. The boundary between the physical and spiritual dissolves.
The Haftarah: Judges 13:2–25
The connection to the Torah portion is immediate. The Nazirite vow appears in Numbers 6, and the Haftarah gives us Samson, the most famous Nazirite in Scripture. Except Samson didn’t choose the vow. It was chosen for him, from the womb, by God.
The story opens on an unnamed woman, wife of Manoah, who is barren. She has no name in the text. The rabbis gave her one: Tzlelponit. But the text doesn’t. What the text does give her is the fullness of the narrative. She is the one the angel appears to. She is the one who receives the announcement. She is the one who reports it to her husband. She is the one who interprets the theophany correctly when Manoah panics about dying. She is every bit the protagonist of this chapter.
The angel tells her that her son will be a Nazirite from the womb. No wine, no grape products, no razor to his head. He will begin to deliver Israel from the Philistines. Notice that word: begin. This is not a promise of complete deliverance. It’s a first step, and God is being upfront about that.
When Manoah prays for the angel to come back and give them more instruction, God hears him and sends the angel again. But the angel returns to the woman. Not to Manoah. To her.
And then Manoah tries to get the angel’s name. The angel says it is peleh, meaning wonderful, or beyond understanding. The same word used in Isaiah 9:6 for the name of the coming one. Manoah doesn’t catch it. His wife does.
Their response to watching the angel ascend in the flame of the altar is instructive. Manoah is terrified. He assumes they’ll die because they’ve seen God. His wife is remarkably level-headed. She walks him through the logic: God accepted our offering. God showed us these things. God told us about the coming child. If God wanted us dead, none of that would have happened.
She sees clearly. He can barely stand up. And this is the Haftarah for a portion about eyes, about the letter ayin, about what it means to see what God is actually doing instead of projecting your fear onto the situation.
The Besorah: Mark 13:14–27
This is Yeshua speaking to his disciples on the Mount of Olives, and it is one of the most misread passages in the New Testament. There’s a long history of reading these verses as a checklist of coming events to be mapped onto current headlines, and that reading misses almost everything important about what Yeshua is actually doing here.
He’s reading Daniel. Specifically, he’s talking about the “abomination of desolation” Daniel prophesied about, and Jesus is basically telling his disciples: when you see it? RUN. Immediately. Don’t stop to pack. Don’t go back for your coat. Don’t grab your favorite casserole dish or your “live laugh love” scroll from the kitchen wall. Leave.
And that’s important because this isn’t framed like some vague, abstract warning floating thousands of years out in the future somewhere. Jesus is speaking with urgency to actual people sitting in front of him. People who may very well live long enough to see exactly what he’s describing.
This is less “someday mystery timeline” and more “when this starts happening, get out of Jerusalem fast.”
In 70 CE, the Roman armies desecrated the Temple and destroyed it. Many scholars, including Messianic Jewish ones, read Mark 13 as Yeshua’s precise and accurate prophecy of that event.
The language of urgency, the instruction to flee to the mountains, the reference to pregnant women and nursing mothers in winter: these are not metaphors. They are the practical logistics of what it meant to survive a siege. And the early believers in Jerusalem, who remembered this teaching, reportedly fled to Pella across the Jordan and were spared the worst of the destruction.
But Yeshua doesn’t stop there. Oh no, he keeps going. He extends the prophetic vision beyond 70 CE into something that echoes it again at the end of the age: great tribulation, false messiahs, and signs and wonders designed to lead the elect astray if possible. Because apparently spiritual deception with a little theatrics and confidence has been a human problem for a very long time.
And then this:
“And then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And then He will send the angels and will gather together His elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.” -- Mark 13:26-27 (TLV)
The word translated “see” is the Greek optontai, from horao. But Yeshua is teaching to a Jewish audience steeped in Hebrew categories of vision. Seeing, in this tradition, isn’t passive. It’s recognitive. It’s the eye of understanding finally landing on the truth that was always there.
The ayin, the eye, appears in the climax of the Besorah. After all the false seeing, all the deception, all the things designed to make you look the wrong direction, there is a moment of genuine sight. They will see. The elect will be gathered. The one who has been there all along will be unmistakably visible.
Thematic Threads
Naso is a portion about being seen and about seeing clearly. Those two movements, God turning His face toward you and you learning to turn your eyes toward what is real, run through every section.
The Levites are seen and counted in their labor. The Nazirite makes consecration visible through the body. The Aaronic blessing is God’s face turning toward the people with undivided attention. The chieftains are seen individually, gift by gift, name by name. Manoah’s wife sees clearly while her husband is overwhelmed. Yeshua warns about false signs designed to deceive the seeing eye, and ends with the promise of a sight that cannot be counterfeited.
The Hebrew letter ayin, which means eye, is also the root of the word ayin tovah, “good eye,” which is the Jewish idiom for generosity.
The person with a good eye sees others with abundance and acts accordingly. The person with an ayin ra, a bad or evil eye, sees the world through scarcity and envy. The Nazirite vow, in a sense, is a discipline of the ayin. You’re training yourself not to be controlled by what your eyes desire. Wine, beauty, the dead face of someone you loved. You’re teaching your sight to serve something other than appetite.
And the Aaronic blessing promises exactly that from God’s side. God’s face turns toward you. God’s eye is on you. Not with suspicion, not to catch you, but with the full weight of divine attention as something that protects and fills and restores.
Verse Mapping Aid: Ayin Tovah and the Eye of Blessing
Numbers 6:25 -- TLV: “Adonai make His face to shine on you and be gracious to you!”
The Hebrew phrase is ya’er Adonai panav elekha vi’chunekha.
Ya’er comes from the root or, meaning light. Specifically the hiphil (causative) form: to cause to shine, to illuminate, to make bright. This is not dim light. This is full illumination.
Panav means face, from the root panah, to turn toward. The plural form panim suggests fullness, all of God’s attention directed at you.
Vi’chunekha comes from the root chanan, to be gracious, to show favor, to grant freely what is not earned. This is grace in its most precise biblical form: undeserved favor flowing from the character of the giver, not the merit of the recipient.
The structure is striking. God’s face shines, and grace follows. The sequence matters. The illumination comes first, and then the grace that the light reveals. To be fully seen by God, without the hiding that fear produces, is to receive grace. There’s a kind of theology embedded in the grammar.
Ayin (eye) in the context of Naso
The root letter ayin (the sixteenth letter of the aleph-bet, numeric value 70) runs like an invisible current through the whole portion. The census is about being seen. The Nazirite’s crown of hair is a visual declaration. The Aaronic blessing centers on God’s face. Manoah’s wife sees what her husband cannot. Yeshua promises that the elect will finally see.
And then there’s seventy. Because of course there is. The rabbis said there are seventy faces of Torah… seventy ways to read and receive the Word. Which honestly feels like God gently reminding people to calm down before acting like their one interpretation descended from Sinai engraved on stone tablets personally delivered by Moses himself.
Ayin is the invitation not to reduce Scripture to one single meaning, but to let your eye move across it until the deeper thing finally comes into focus.
Hebrew Letter Lesson: Ayin (
ע
Ayin | Eye | Seeing | Fountain
The name of the letter ayin is also the Hebrew word for eye. The ancient pictographic form of this letter was drawn as an eye, and you can still see it if you look: the modern Hebrew ayin (ayin) retains two prongs that once suggested two eyes, or a forked view outward into the world.
Ayin is a silent letter in modern Hebrew. It has no sound of its own in contemporary pronunciation, though in ancient Semitic it was a guttural consonant produced deep in the throat. Something seen but not heard. Something that gives shape to meaning without speaking.
Numeric Value: 70
Meaning: Eye, fountain, spring, perception, insight, spiritual sight
The double meaning of ayin is worth having a think on for a minute. It means eye, but it also means fountain or spring. The same Hebrew word. The connection is both poetic and practical: a body of water, seen from a distance, catches and reflects the sky. It almost looks like it’s looking back at you. And in the wilderness, a spring wasn’t just pretty scenery for your desert Instagram aesthetic. It was survival. To see a spring was to see life.
Ayin also gives us the concepts of ayin tovah, the good eye, and ayin ra, the evil eye. And before somebody turns this into Hebrew horoscope theology and starts rebuking people with Etsy crystals and a shofar collection, no. This isn’t superstition. It’s about perception. Orientation. The posture of the heart revealed through the way a person sees.
The good eye sees with abundance, generosity, and openness. The evil eye sees through scarcity, envy, suspicion, and the exhausting spiritual habit of comparing everybody else’s portion to your own. The rabbis were making a profound claim about the moral weight of attention itself: what your eye continually rests on will eventually shape the kind of person you become.
A Little Nugget
There’s a Jewish teaching that says: when wine goes in, secrets come out. The connection to ayin is this: the numeric value of wine (yayin) is 70, and the numeric value of sod (secret) is also 70. They’re the same number. The eye that is trained to see clearly is the same capacity that can perceive what is hidden. The Nazirite, who abstains from wine entirely, is not just practicing restraint. They are protecting their sight. There are things you cannot perceive when your senses are dulled by appetite. The discipline of the ayin is the discipline of staying awake.
Application:
What does it mean to have an ayin tovah toward the people in your life this week? Toward yourself?
The Aaronic blessing promises that God’s face shines on you. When you receive that blessing, are you standing in it or deflecting it?
Yeshua’s warning in Mark 13 is partly about learning to see clearly enough not to be deceived. What spiritual disciplines help you keep your sight clear?
My Final Thoughts
Naso is a long portion and a strange one and an overwhelming one, and most people skip to the Aaronic blessing and call it a day. I understand that impulse completely. But if you don’t see what the blessing is sitting inside, you’re reading it out of context in a way that costs you something.
The Aaronic blessing comes at the end of a section that talks about what consecration actually looks like in a body, in a household, in a community. It comes after the Nazirite vow, which is about deliberately training your physical senses away from appetite and toward holiness.
It comes after the chieftains’ offerings, where God refuses to let any single act of worship collapse into a statistic. It comes after all of that, and it is God saying: here is what I see when I look at you. I see you enough to bless you by name. I am turning my face toward you. I am granting you shalom.
That blessing isn’t a liturgical flourish. It is the covenant declaration of a God who does not look away.
Manoah’s wife understood that intuitively. She knew that being seen by God and surviving it wasn’t a contradiction. She knew it was, in fact, the point. The God who has just shown you extraordinary things is not a God trying to kill you. He’s a God trying to make you understand that you’re chosen for something bigger than your fear.
And then Yeshua reaches all the way to the end of the age, promising that the elect will finally see. After all the deception, all the smoke, all the counterfeit spectacle, all the signs designed to disorient people who mistake charisma for truth and branding for anointing, there comes a moment when the eye finally lands on what is real.
The Son of Man coming in the clouds.
No fog machines. No manipulative lighting cues. No “VIP covenant partner seating.” Just the unmistakable revelation of the King.
And the elect gathered from the four winds.
Ayin. Eye. The capacity to see what God is doing, even when everything around you is designed to make you look elsewhere.
That’s the skill Naso is teaching. Pay attention. God’s face is toward you.
Weekly Practice
Every morning this week, before you look at your phone or start your to-do list, sit with Numbers 6:24-26 and receive the Aaronic blessing as a personal word spoken over you. Read it slowly. All three lines. Let the word shalom settle somewhere in your body before the day starts.
Then, at some point during the day, practice the ayin tovah exercise: look at one person in your life and deliberately choose to see them through abundance rather than scarcity. They’re not a burden. They’re not a problem. They’re a person with a name that God would write out in full.
Bible Study Questions
Read Numbers 4:21-49 and make a list of every specific task assigned to the Gershonites and Merarites. Now cross-reference Exodus 25-27, where God gave the original instructions for building each of those items. What does it tell you about God’s character that the same God who designed the Tabernacle in painstaking detail also named and counted the men responsible for carrying it through the wilderness?
Read Numbers 6:1-21 in full and list the three requirements of the Nazirite vow. Then look up Leviticus 21:1-4 and 10-11, where similar restrictions are placed on the priests. What do you notice about the overlap? What does it suggest that a voluntary vow could make an ordinary Israelite, man or woman, subject to priestly-level holiness requirements?
Read Numbers 6:9-12, which describes what happens when a Nazirite accidentally comes into contact with a dead body. The vow doesn’t just pause; it restarts entirely. Now read Judges 13:3-5, where Samson is declared a Nazirite from the womb. Then read Judges 14:8-9 and 14:10. Based on what you read in Numbers 6, how many times had Samson already broken his vow before Delilah ever touched his hair? What does that trajectory tell you about the difference between the form of consecration and its substance?
Read the Aaronic blessing in Numbers 6:24-26 and then look up Psalm 67:1-2. The psalmist is almost quoting the blessing word for word but then adds something. What does he add, and why does that addition change the scope of the blessing from a prayer for Israel to a prayer with a global purpose? Now read Genesis 12:2-3 alongside both passages. What covenant thread connects all three?
Read Numbers 7 in full, yes the whole thing, and resist the urge to skim. Every chieftain’s offering is listed identically twelve times. Now read Revelation 7:4-8, where the twelve tribes are also named individually. What pattern do you see across both texts about how God accounts for the people of Israel? What does the repetition in Numbers 7 teach you about how God receives worship?
Read Judges 13:2-25 and pay attention to every scene in which the angel appears. Note who is present each time and what each person says and does. Then read Luke 1:5-20, the announcement to Zechariah, and Luke 1:26-38, the announcement to Mary. What similarities and differences do you observe across all three birth announcements? What do those parallels suggest about how God works across the sweep of Scripture when He is about to do something significant?
Read Mark 13:14-27 slowly, then read Daniel 9:27 and Daniel 12:1-4, which Yeshua is directly quoting and referencing. Now read Luke 21:20-24, Luke’s parallel account, where he makes the referent even more explicit. Based on all three texts together, what do you understand Yeshua to be warning His disciples about, and why would a first-century Jewish disciple have recognized the urgency of the instruction to flee immediately without stopping for their coat?
Reflection Questions
Where in your life right now do you feel like a Levite: carrying the structure, doing necessary work that no one is counting or naming? How does the Torah’s careful census of those workers land in that place?
The ayin means both eye and fountain. Where do you need to see a source of life right now? Where are you looking but not finding what you need, and what would it mean to let God’s eyes be the fountain you’re watching for?
Manoah’s wife says to her panicking husband, essentially, “If God wanted us dead, He would not have shown us these things.” Where in your life do you need the logic of her faith? Where are you assuming the worst about God’s intentions based on fear rather than evidence?
Yeshua warns about signs and wonders designed to lead even the elect astray. What in your current media environment, spiritual environment, or relational environment is making it harder to see clearly? What would it mean to protect your sight this week?
Action Challenges
Write the Aaronic blessing (Numbers 6:24-26) out by hand on an index card. Put it somewhere you see first thing in the morning. Read it out loud over yourself every day this week. Not as wishful thinking. As covenant reality.
Choose one person in your life and practice ayin tovah with them. See them through abundance. Write down three specific things they bring to the world that you genuinely value. Tell them at least one of those things this week.
Read Mark 13 in full, slowly, with a map of first-century Judea nearby. Trace the geography. Look up what happened in 70 CE. Let the historical grounding change how the passage sounds. Then sit with verses 26-27 and receive the promised ending.
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About the Author
Diane Ferreira is a Jewish believer in Yeshua, a published author, speaker, seminary student, wife, and proud mom. She is the founder of She’s So Scripture and She Opens Her Bible. She is the author of several books, including The Proverbs 31-ish Woman, which debuted as Amazon’s #1 New Release in Religious Humor, as well as Holy, Hormonal and Holding On.
She is currently pursuing her graduate degree in Jewish Studies in seminary, with her favorite topics being the early church and Biblical Hebrew. Diane writes and teaches from a unique perspective, bridging her Jewish heritage with vibrant faith in the Messiah to bring clarity, depth, and devotion to everyday believers.
When she’s not writing, studying, or teaching, you’ll find her curled up with a good book, crocheting something cozy, traveling, or playing her favorite video games.
Tree of Life (TLV) – Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.
Sefaria, “Numbers 6,” Sefaria, accessed May 27, 2026, https://www.sefaria.org/Numbers.6.
Sefaria, “Babylonian Talmud Sotah 2a,” Sefaria, accessed May 27, 2026, https://www.sefaria.org/Sotah.2a.
Sefaria, “Pirkei Avot 5:19,” Sefaria, accessed May 26, 2026, https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.5.19.