Numbers 1:27

Summary

Numbers 1:27 reports the total count of registered men belonging to the tribe of Judah, giving the number as 74,600. The verse consists of a construct phrase identifying the group counted, followed by a compound cardinal number expressing the total.

Key words

• pequdei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural construct; denotes "those who were counted/mustered of," setting up a relationship with the following suffix.
• hem ("their", H9028) — third person plural pronominal suffix attached to the participle, yielding "the enrolled ones of them," i.e., those belonging to a specific group.
• matteh ("[the] tribe of", H4294H) — masculine singular construct noun, linking to the proper name that follows to specify which tribe.
• Yehudah ("Judah", H3063G) — proper noun identifying the tribe.
• elef ("thousand", H0505G) — cardinal number in construct-adjacent position, combined with preceding and following numerals to build the compound total.

What the text says

The verse opens with the construct chain pequdei hem le-matteh Yehudah ("the enrolled of them, of the tribe of Judah"), where the passive participle pequdei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) functions almost as a technical census term, referring back to men counted in a preceding enumeration process. The suffix hem ("their", H9028) ties this participle to the group previously described, and the preposition le ("of", H9005) before matteh ("tribe of", H4294H) marks tribal affiliation, common in the Numbers census formula.

The numerical total is built cumulatively: arba'ah ("four", H0702) is joined by the conjunction ve ("and", H9002) to shiv'im ("seventy", H7657), producing "four and seventy" (74). This is joined again by ve to elef ("thousand", H0505G), giving "74 thousand." A further ve connects to shesh ("six", H8337), in construct form, governing me'ot ("hundreds", H3967, feminine plural), producing "six hundred." The full sequence reads literally "four and seventy thousand and six hundreds," equivalent to 74,600. This additive numeral construction, common in Biblical Hebrew census lists, differs from single cardinal-number expressions in some target languages, which is why translations render the sum directly as "74,600" rather than preserving the step-by-step Hebrew phrasing.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text names the tribe as Yehudah ("Judah", H3063G) and states the total as 74,600 (arba'ah ve-shiv'im elef ve-shesh me'ot). The Septuagint text provided here names the tribe as Ἰσσαχάρ ("Issachar") and gives the number as τέσσαρες καὶ πεντήκοντα χιλιάδες καὶ τετρακόσιοι ("fifty-four thousand four hundred"), differing both in tribal name and numeral from the Hebrew. The Vulgate (VULCLEM) omits the tribal name in the cited line, stating only "recensiti sunt septuaginta quatuor millia sexcenti" ("74,600 were counted"), matching the Hebrew numeral but not repeating "Judah" in this segment.