Leviticus 27:3

then his valuation for a male from twenty years old unto sixty years, fifty shekels, in the shekel of the sanctuary, shall be his valuation:

from twenty years beginning with the age when one enters into the census.

sixty when one becomes old. The opinion of many is that these laws are simply unexplained decrees. Thus from the age of one month until the age of five years, one must give five sheqalim — even for someone only one day older than one month, one must give five sheqalim . Sa‘adya Gaon believed, however, that one must give one sheqel for every year of age, up till and including the age of five. Nevertheless, the majority opinion is that there are four fixed valuations (corresponding to the four stages of a person’s life). The second stage extends up to and including the age of nineteen, and the third stage extends up to and including the age of fifty-nine. Within each of these stages, one’s valuation always remains at the same level it assumed at the beginning of the stage. The fourth stage lasts roughly fifteen years, giving a total of seventy-five years for the four stages of life. The truth is that one passes from each stage to the next at the exact number of years specified [⊂ Arakhin 18a]. One might entertain the supposition, however, that the passing of a single day in a year is as good as the passing of a year [e.g., Rosh HaShana 2b]. We need not depend on the tradition alone to refute this idea — we can simply point out, Why would it then be necessary to specify a lower limit of one month in the one month to five year interval? The period until five years, and the period until twenty years, might lead one to conclude that a man’s valuation goes up one sheqel every year until the age of sixty, at which point his valuation begins to decrease. One can answer the “one month” argument within the context of this supposition by stating simply that a person younger than one month has no valuation. However, what can one say about the period over sixty years? Does one continue to decrease the valuation ad infinitum ? Clearly, all of these alternate explanations are erroneous. The laws must be understood as Scriptural decrees. For this reason we cannot expect a consistent proportion between the valuation of a male and that of a female. After the age of sixty, the male valuation exceeds the female valuation by one-third; between the ages of five and twenty, the male exceeds the female by one half; from one month till five years, and also from twenty years to sixty years, the male exceeds the female by two-fifths.

ערכך; the two letters כ which are repeated here are similar in construction to the word אדמומית, “reddish, derived from אודם, “red,” or לבנונית, “whitish,” from לבן, “white.”