Numbers 2:19

Summary

The verse gives the military census total for a tribal division within the wilderness camp: forty thousand five hundred men are counted as belonging to this group's tzeva ("military group", H6635A). The sentence is a numerical summary statement, typical of the tribal census lists in Numbers 2.

Key words

• tzeva ("military group", H6635A) — masculine singular construct noun; combined with the suffix "his" (u + o), it denotes "his host/military group," the collective body being counted.
• fequdei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural construct; grammatically it means "the ones who were mustered/counted," from the root meaning "to visit, muster, appoint." As a passive participle, it emphasizes that these men were the object of an official counting action, not the agents.
• 'arba'im ("forty", H0705) — cardinal number, masculine plural, functioning as the tens-value of the total.
• 'elef ("thousand", H0505G) — cardinal number, common singular, the unit multiplied by the forty.
• chamesh me'ot ("five hundred", H2568 + H3967) — cardinal number construct chain, adding the remainder to the total count.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence has no finite verb; it is a nominal clause built from two paired construct phrases followed by a number. The first phrase, u-tzevo ("and his military group"), identifies the entity being enumerated. The second phrase, u-fequdehem ("and their enrolled [men]"), restates this same group using the passive participle of the root paqad — the verb used throughout Numbers 1–2 for the census-taking process. The double naming (tzeva + pequdei) is a stylistic feature of the census formula, pairing the collective military designation with the technical term for those who underwent the counting procedure. The final numeral, 'arba'im 'elef va-chamesh me'ot ("forty thousand and five hundred"), is built by simple additive juxtaposition: forty units of a thousand, joined by va- ("and") to five units of a hundred.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders fequdehem ("their enrolled ones") with οἱ μένοι, a term whose sense of "remaining/enduring" differs from the Hebrew's emphasis on being "counted/mustered." The Vulgate expands tzevo ("his military group") into exercitus pugnatorum ejus ("the army of his fighters"), explicitly adding the notion of combatants (pugnatorum) that is not lexically present in the Hebrew noun tzeva itself, which denotes a host or group without specifying fighting function.