Numbers 2:11

Summary

Numbers 2:11 records the total number of enrolled men in a military division: forty-six thousand five hundred (46,500). The verse consists almost entirely of a numerical formula attached to a reference to a "host" and its "counted/enrolled" members.

Key words

• tzeva ("military group / host", H6635A) — masculine singular construct noun, meaning "the host of...", requiring the following possessive suffix to complete the phrase.
• u ("his", H9023) — pronominal suffix attached to tzeva, producing "his host" (i.e., the host belonging to the tribal group in context).
• fekuDai ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural construct, from a root meaning "to count/muster"; the passive form indicates men who have been counted/mustered, and the construct form links it to the possessive suffix that follows.
• shishah ("six", H8337) — cardinal number, common gender singular, the first element of the compound number forty-six.
• chamesh ("five", H2568) — cardinal number, common gender singular construct, here governing me'ot ("hundreds", H3967) to form "five hundred."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of construct phrases followed by a numerical total. It opens with u-tzevaO ("and his host") and u-fekuDav ("and his enrolled men"), both nouns in construct form bound to the third-person masculine singular suffix o ("his"), referring back to a tribal leader or group named earlier in the chapter's list (not present in this verse alone). The construct chain "his host [and] his enrolled men" identifies the group being counted before the number itself is given.

The numeral sequence that follows — shishah ve-'arba'im 'elef va-chamesh me'ot ("six and forty thousand and five hundred") — follows the standard Biblical Hebrew practice of stating the smaller unit (six) before the larger (forty), then adding "thousand," then "and five hundred." This produces the total 46,500. The grammatical construct forms (tzeva, fekuDai, chamesh) all function to link one noun or number to the next, a feature of Hebrew syntax not always visible in translation, where the numbers are simply rendered as an English or Spanish figure.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (VULCLEM) explicitly adds exercitus pugnatorum ("army of fighters"), interpretively expanding tzeva ("host") with the notion of "fighters," a specification not present in the Hebrew noun itself. The LXX (LXXSWETE) uses dynamis ("power/force") for tzeva and hoi epeskemmenoi ("those who have been reviewed/mustered") for fekuDai, both consistent with a military-review sense but phrased with different lexical choices than the Hebrew's construct noun pair. The Spanish RV1909 and SBLIBRE render tzeva as "hueste" or "división" and fekuDai as "contados," staying closer to a literal "counted" sense than the Vulgate's "fighters."