Numbers 2:15

Summary

This verse gives the total count of a military division (likely belonging to the tribe mentioned in the preceding verse, Gad, within the broader census of Numbers 2). The Hebrew states that the enrolled men of this group numbered forty-five thousand six hundred fifty.

Key words

• tzeva ("military group", H6635A) — masculine singular construct noun with pronominal suffix o ("his"), meaning "his host/division"; the construct form links it to an antecedent tribal leader named in the preceding verses.
• fekudei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural construct, meaning "those who were counted/mustered"; the participle form indicates these are the men who underwent the census procedure, not merely "soldiers" in a generic sense.
• chamishah ("five", H2568) and arba'im ("forty", H0705) — cardinal numbers combined to express "forty-five," describing the thousands.
• shesh ("six", H8337) — cardinal number in construct form ("X of hundreds"), linking directly to me'ot ("hundreds", H3967) to form "six hundred."
• chamishim ("fifty", H2572) — cardinal number, masculine plural, closing the sum as "fifty," added to the six hundred.

What the text says

The verse is built entirely as a numerical formula attached to two head nouns from the start of the sentence: tzevao ("his military group") and fekudeihem ("their enrolled men"). Both nouns appear in construct form, syntactically anticipating the numbers that follow as their content — literally "his group and their enrolled ones: forty-five thousand and six hundred and fifty." The repeated conjunction ve- ("and") before each numerical component (arba'im, shesh, chamishim) is a standard Hebrew construction for building compound numbers, joining discrete units (thousands, hundreds, tens) into a single total.

The construct chain of shesh ("six") governing me'ot ("hundreds") shows the standard Hebrew pattern for expressing hundreds — literally "six of hundreds" rather than a single compound word for "six hundred." This is a grammatical feature not visible in translations that simply render the numeral as "600."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders tzevao ("his group") as δύναμις αὐτοῦ ("his power/force"), a translation choice for the military-group sense of the Hebrew noun. The Vulgate expands fekudeihem ("their enrolled men") into exercitus pugnatorum eius, qui numerati sunt ("the army of his fighters, who were counted"), adding the interpretive term pugnatorum ("fighters") not explicit in the Hebrew participle, which denotes only "those enrolled/mustered." Modern translations (BSB, RV1909, SBLIBRE) collapse the construct chain into a single summary figure, "45,650," without preserving the Hebrew's sequential compound-number structure (five-and-forty thousand, six hundred, and fifty).