Numbers 2:28

Summary

The verse gives the total military count for a tribal division (unnamed in this verse but contextually Naphtali), stating that its enrolled men numbered forty-one thousand five hundred.

Key words

• tze.va' ("military group", H6635A) — masculine singular noun in construct form, meaning "the army/host of...", bound to the following pronominal suffix.
• O ("his", H9023) — pronominal suffix attached to tze.va', indicating possession: "his host."
• fe.ku.dei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — Qal passive participle, masculine plural construct, literally "the ones counted/mustered of...", pointing to a formal census action.
• 'e.chad ("[were] one", H0259) — cardinal number, feminine singular, functioning here as part of the compound number "forty-one" (literally "one and forty").
• cha.mesh ("five", H2568) — cardinal number in construct form ("five of..."), linking to me'ot ("hundreds") to form "five hundred."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built from two construct chains joined by u ("and", H9002): tzeva'-O ("his host") and fekudei-hem ("their enrolled ones"). Both nouns are in construct form, meaning they depend grammatically on what follows or on their suffixes rather than standing as independent subjects — the phrase functions as "his host, that is, their enrolled men," restating the same group in two ways before giving the numeral.

The number itself follows Hebrew numeral syntax: 'echad ("one", H0259) precedes 'arba'im ("forty", H0705), producing "one and forty" rather than "forty-one" as in English word order. This is then followed by 'elef ("thousand", H0505G), and the sequence continues with va-chamesh me'ot ("and five hundred"), where chamesh is in construct form governing me'ot ("hundreds", H3967), yielding "five hundred." The full numeral is thus built as a chain of additions: one + forty thousand + five hundred = 41,500.

The participle fekudei (H6485A), being passive, indicates men who were counted or enrolled by an external action (a census), not men who counted themselves — the grammatical voice foregrounds the process of enumeration rather than the men's own agency.

Differences between versions

The LXX (Septuagint) renders the numeral differently in structure: "δύναμις αὐτοῦ οἱ ἐπεσκεμμένοι μία" ("his force, the ones reviewed, one") followed by "τεσσεράκοντα χιλιάδες καὶ πεντακόσιοι" ("forty thousand and five hundred"), splitting the "one" from "forty" in the Greek phrasing. The Vulgate reads "quadraginta millia et mille quingenti" ("forty thousand and one thousand five hundred"), which differs numerically from the Hebrew total of 41,500, as the Vulgate's phrasing suggests 40,000 + 1,500 = 41,500, arriving at the same total through a different numerical breakdown than the Hebrew's "one and forty thousand, and five hundred."