Numbers 2:23

Summary

Numbers 2:23 records a numerical total for a military division, expressed through construct-noun phrases and a compound cardinal number. The Hebrew states the count of "his army" and "their enrolled/mustered [men]" as five and thirty thousand and four hundred — a total of 35,400.

Key words

• tzeva ("military group", H6635A) — masculine singular construct noun, meaning "army of," here bound to the pronominal suffix "his."
• pekudei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural construct, literally "the mustered/counted ones of," bound to "their."
• chamishah ("five", H2568) — cardinal number, common gender singular, the first element of the compound total.
• sheloshim ("thirty", H7970) — cardinal number, masculine plural, joined to chamishah by the conjunction u- ("and").
• arba ("four", H0702) — cardinal number, common gender singular, construct form, meaning "four of," governing me'ot ("hundreds", H3967).

What the text says

The verse is built from two construct chains followed by a compound number. The first chain, tzeva-o ("army of-his"), and the second, pekudei-hem ("enrolled-ones of-their"), are joined by the conjunction u- ("and", H9002), presenting the army and its counted members almost as parallel expressions of the same group rather than two separate entities. Both nouns carry construct + suffix constructions, a common way in Biblical Hebrew to express possession without a separate possessive word.

The numeral itself is built additively: chamishah ("five") plus u-sheloshim ("and thirty") plus 'elef ("thousand", H0505G) plus ve-arba ("and four") plus me'ot ("hundreds"). This yields "five and thirty thousand and four hundred," i.e., 35,400. The Hebrew order places the smaller digit (five) before the larger (thirty) when forming the compound number, a pattern typical of Hebrew numeral syntax, distinct from the English convention of "thirty-five."

Differences between versions

The LXX (Swete) follows the same order as the Hebrew: πέντε καὶ τριάκοντα χιλιάδες ("five and thirty thousand"), preserving the "five-then-thirty" sequence found in the Hebrew numeral construction.

The Vulgate reverses this order: "triginta quinque millia" ("thirty [and] five thousand"), matching the customary Latin numeral sequence rather than the Hebrew's "five and thirty." The final numeric value (35,400) is identical across the Hebrew, LXX, and Vulgate; only the internal word order of the compound number differs.