Numbers 10:15

Summary

The verse identifies the leader appointed over the military division (tzeva, "military group of", H6635A) of the tribe of the descendants of Issachar. That leader is named as Nethanel, son of Zuar, using the standard patronymic formula.

Key words

• tze.Va' ("military group of", H6635A) — masculine singular construct noun; it links to the following word "tribe" to form a chain describing the specific army-unit belonging to that tribe.
• ma.Teh ("tribe of", H4294H) — masculine singular construct; continues the construct chain, showing that the tzeva is the tzeva of a particular matteh.
• be.Nei ("descendants of", H1121G) — masculine plural construct of "son"; extends the chain further, specifying that the tribe belongs to the "sons of Issachar."
• ben- ("son of", H1121A) — masculine singular construct; used in the personal patronymic "Nethanel son of Zuar," a different construct use than the tribal chain above, here marking individual lineage rather than group affiliation.
• ye.ho.shu.a is absent here, but note yi.so.sh.Khar ("Issachar", H3485G) — proper name functioning as the final noun in the construct chain, anchoring the whole phrase to a specific tribal ancestor.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with the conjunction ve ("and", H9002) attached to the preposition 'Al- ("[was] over", H5921A), which governs the noun chain that follows. This chain — tzeva / matteh / benei / Yissakhar — is a series of nested construct relationships: "the military-group-of the-tribe-of the-descendants-of Issachar." Each noun in construct state depends on the next, producing a compact genitive structure that in English requires four separate prepositional phrases ("the division of the tribe of the descendants of Issachar") to convey the same information that Hebrew expresses through simple juxtaposition without an explicit verb "to be." The verb "was" supplied in translations (e.g., BSB "was over") is not present in the Hebrew text itself; it is inferred from the preposition 'Al- combined with the personal name that follows.

The second half of the verse names the individual placed in this position: Netan'El ("Nethanel") ben ("son of", H1121A) Tzu'Ar ("Zuar"). This is a standard Hebrew naming formula using the construct noun ben to link a personal name to a father's name, distinct in function from the tribal construct chain earlier in the verse, though both use the same construct grammatical mechanism.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders tzeva ("military group of", H6635A) with dynameōs ("of the force/army"), consistent with the Hebrew's military nuance. The Vulgate simplifies the construct chain, omitting an equivalent for tzeva altogether and stating only "In tribu filiorum Issachar fuit princeps" ("In the tribe of the sons of Issachar there was a leader"), collapsing the layered Hebrew construct structure into a single prepositional clause and introducing the word "princeps" ("leader"), which has no direct lexical counterpart among the Hebrew words listed.