Numbers 1:25

Summary

Numbers 1:25 gives the census total for the tribe of Gad: 45,650 men were enrolled. The verse consists almost entirely of a construct chain identifying the group counted, followed by a compound number.

Key words

• pekudei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural construct; it means "the ones who were mustered/counted of," setting up the following genitive relationship with "their" and "tribe."
• mateh ("[the] tribe of", H4294H) — masculine singular construct, linking directly to the proper name that follows.
• Gad (H1410G) — proper name, identifying which tribal group is being enumerated.
• chamishah ("five", H2568) and arba'im ("forty", H0705) — cardinal numbers joined by ve ("and", H9002), together forming "forty-five," which then modifies 'elef ("thousand", H0505G).
• shesh ("six", H8337) — cardinal number in construct form, governing me'ot ("hundreds", H3967) to produce "six hundred," itself joined by va to chamishim ("fifty", H2572).

What the text says

The verse opens with the passive participle pekudei plus the pronominal suffix Hem ("their", H9028), literally "the enrolled-ones of them," a phrase that recurs in each tribal census formula throughout the chapter. This participle stands in construct with mateh Gad, "the tribe of Gad," so the whole opening clause reads literally "the enrolled of them, belonging to the tribe of Gad." The rest of the verse is a chain of cardinal numbers connected by the conjunction ve/va ("and"): "five and forty, thousand, and six hundreds, and fifty" — i.e., 45,650. Hebrew numeral syntax builds compound numbers by stringing units, tens, hundreds, and thousands together with repeated conjunctions rather than using a single fixed numeral word, which is why the phrase appears as a sequence of coordinated terms rather than one continuous figure.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text names the tribe as Gad (H1410G) and gives the total 45,650. The Vulgate (VULCLEM) preserves the same numeral value, "quadraginta quinque millia sexcenti quinquaginta" (45,650), but the tribal name is not repeated in this verse, continuing syntactically from the prior clause. The LXX text supplied (LXXSWETE) reads "ἐκ τῆς φυλῆς Ἰούδα" ("of the tribe of Judah") rather than Gad, and gives the number as "τέσσαρες καὶ ἑβδομήκοντα χιλιάδες καὶ ἑξακόσιοι" (seventy-four thousand six hundred), differing both in tribal name and numeral from the Hebrew and Vulgate. The modern versions (RV1909, BSB, SBLIBRE) follow the Hebrew wording and numeral, rendering the tribe as Gad with the total 45,650.