Numbers 2:21

Summary

This verse states the total troop count for a tribal military division: "his army and their enrolled men" numbered thirty-two thousand two hundred. The verse consists of two paired construct nouns (identifying whose army is counted) followed by a compound cardinal number giving the total.

Key words

• tzeva ("military group", H6635A) — masculine singular construct, "army of," linked to the following pronominal suffix o ("his").
• fequdei ("enrolled men", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural construct, literally "the ones who were counted/mustered of," paired with the suffix hem ("their").
• shenayim ("two", H8147) — dual form of the numeral, used here as the units digit in "thirty-two."
• shloshim ("thirty", H7970) — masculine plural cardinal, combined with shenayim to form "thirty-two."
• matayim ("two hundred", H3967) — dual form of me'ah ("hundred"), literally "two hundreds," giving the final digit group of the total.

What the text says

The verse opens with two parallel construct phrases joined by u ("and"): tzeva-o ("his army") and fequdei-hem ("their enrolled men"). Both nouns are in construct state, meaning grammatically they anticipate a following genitive, but here the sense is completed by the attached pronominal suffixes ("his," "their") rather than an explicit noun — the referent (a specific tribal group) is understood from the preceding context in the chapter, not stated within this verse itself.

The numeral sequence shenayim u-shloshim 'elef u-matayim is built additively: "two and thirty" (32) modifies 'elef ("thousand"), and u-matayim ("and two hundred") is added afterward. Hebrew commonly places the smaller number before the larger ("two and thirty" rather than "thirty-two"), a structural feature that differs from the word order in English or Spanish translations. The dual forms shenayim and matayim are grammatically distinct from plural forms — Hebrew marks pairs explicitly, so "two hundred" is expressed by the dual of "hundred," not by "hundred" plus a separate word for "two."

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text gives the final figure as u-matayim ("and two hundred"), yielding a total of 32,200. The Vulgate (ducenti, "two hundred") and the modern translations (BSB, RV1909, SBLIBRE) agree with this figure. The LXX (Swete), however, reads τετρακόσιοι ("four hundred"), producing a total of 32,400 — a numerical divergence from the Hebrew and Vulgate readings at this specific digit.