Numbers 1:29

Summary

The verse reports the census total for the tribe of Issachar: the men enrolled numbered fifty-four thousand four hundred. The sentence is built entirely from a participle, a tribal name, and a sequence of cardinal numbers joined by the conjunction "and."

Key words

• pequdei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural construct; it names the category being counted, "the enrolled of...", linking directly to the following tribe name.
• mattEh ("[the] tribe of", H4294H) — masculine singular construct noun, forming the phrase "tribe of Issachar" with the following proper name.
• Yissaskhar ("Issachar", H3485G) — proper name identifying which tribal group is being enumerated.
• 'arba'ah ("[were] four", H0702) — cardinal number, common gender singular, the first digit of the total (paired later with "fifty").
• 'elef ("thousand", H0505G) — cardinal number, common gender singular, marking the order of magnitude for the count "fifty-four thousand."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence has no finite verb; it is a nominal (verbless) clause built around the participle pequdei ("enrolled [men]"), which stands in construct with the pronominal suffix hem ("their") and then with le-matteh Yissaskhar ("of the tribe of Issachar"). This construct chain identifies the subject: "their enrolled [men], of the tribe of Issachar." The predicate is simply the number that follows, without any copula—Biblical Hebrew regularly omits "to be" in such enumerative clauses, letting the numerals stand as the completion of the sentence.

The number itself is built additively: 'arba'ah va-chamishim 'elef ("four and fifty thousand") gives 54,000, and ve-'arba' me'ot ("and four hundred") adds 400, for a total of 54,400. The order "four and fifty" (ones before tens) is a standard Hebrew numeral pattern, differing from the English word order "fifty-four," though the numeric value is identical. The word 'elef ("thousand") governs the whole preceding phrase "four and fifty," showing that the multiplication applies to the combined ones-and-tens number rather than to "four" alone.

Differences between versions

The Septuagint text supplied (Swete) names the tribe as "Ζαβουλὼν" (Zebulun) rather than Issachar as in the Hebrew Yissaskhar, and gives the total as "ἑπτὰ καὶ πεντήκοντα χιλιάδες καὶ τετρακόσιοι" ("seven and fifty thousand and four hundred," i.e., 57,400) instead of the Hebrew's 54,400. The Vulgate (quinquaginta quatuor millia quadringenti, "fifty-four thousand four hundred") and the modern translations shown (RV1909, BSB, SBLIBRE) agree numerically with the Hebrew total of 54,400 and identify the tribe as Issachar, matching the Masoretic Hebrew rather than the LXX figures presented here.