Numbers 1:46

Summary

Numbers 1:46 gives the final total of the census taken in the wilderness: all the men enrolled numbered 603,550. The verse is purely numerical, closing the list of tribal counts given earlier in the chapter with a summary statement.

Key words

• va-yihyu ("and they were", H1961) — qal narrative form of the verb "to be," marking this as the concluding statement of a narrative sequence, resuming the count after the tribal lists.
• kol ("all", H3605) — construct singular noun meaning "all/totality of," linking to the next word to form "all of the enrolled."
• ha-pekudim ("the enrolled", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural, with definite article; refers to those who had been counted/mustered, functioning here as a substantive ("the ones enrolled").
• shesh-me'ot elef ("six hundred thousand", H8337/H3967/H0505G) — construct chain of cardinal numbers: "six" (construct) governs "hundreds" (feminine plural), multiplied by "thousand," producing the base figure 600,000.
• chamishim ("fifty", H2572) — cardinal number, masculine plural, the final unit added to complete the total.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of construct numeral phrases joined by the conjunction va ("and", H9002), each one added cumulatively: shesh-me'ot elef ("six hundred thousand") + u-shloshet alafim ("and three thousand") + va-chamesh me'ot ("and five hundred") + va-chamishim ("and fifty"). Hebrew numeral syntax here uses construct singular forms (shesh, "six"; shloshet, "three"; chamesh, "five") governing the counted nouns (me'ot, "hundreds"; alafim, "thousands"), a pattern typical of Biblical Hebrew large-number expressions where each numeral component is stated separately rather than combined into a single compound numeral as in modern languages.

The subject of the sentence is kol ha-pekudim ("all the enrolled"), a passive participle used substantivally — grammatically it does not name who did the enrolling, only that these men had been the object of enrollment. The verb va-yihyu ("and they were") functions as a simple existential/copulative verb reporting the resulting total, tying this verse to the preceding tribal enumerations as their grand sum.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew presents the number through a multi-part construct chain (six hundred, thousand; three, thousands; five, hundreds; fifty), while the LXX (Swete) renders it as a sequence of already-formed numeral words (ἑξακόσιαι χιλιάδες, "six hundred thousands"; τρισχίλιοι, "three thousand"; πεντακόσιοι, "five hundred"; πεντήκοντα, "fifty"), collapsing the Hebrew's separate construct elements into standard Greek numeral compounds. The Vulgate (sexcenta tria millia... quingenti quinquaginta) similarly compresses the phrasing into Latin numeral idiom, merging "six hundred three thousand" into one expression rather than preserving the Hebrew's stepwise addition. The modern versions (BSB, RV1909, SBLIBRE) likewise present the sum as a single number (603,550) without reflecting the Hebrew's segmented construct-numeral structure.