Numbers 2:30

Summary

Numbers 2:30 gives the total headcount for a specific military division, stating that its army and enrolled men numbered fifty-three thousand four hundred. The verse consists almost entirely of two construct nouns followed by a compound cardinal number.

Key words

• tzeva ("military group", H6635A) — masculine singular noun in construct form, meaning it is bound to the following pronominal suffix "his" (u, H9023), producing "his army/military group."
• fekudei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — a Qal passive participle, masculine plural, in construct form; as a passive participle it describes men who have been counted or mustered, and the construct form links it to "their" (hem, H9028).
• sheloshah ("three", H7969) — cardinal number, common gender singular, the first element of the three-part number that totals 53,400.
• chamishim ("fifty", H2572) — cardinal number, masculine plural, combined with sheloshah to form "fifty-three" before "thousand" ('Elef, H0505G).
• me'ot ("hundreds", H3967) — feminine plural cardinal number, combined with 'arba' ("four", H0702, in construct form) to yield "four hundred."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence has no verb; it is a nominal clause built from two construct-suffix pairs — tzeva'o ("his army") and fekudeihem ("their enrolled men") — followed directly by the number. This construction presents the army and its counted personnel as a single totaled unit rather than as two separate figures. The number itself is built additively: "three and fifty thousand and four hundred," which in the source language reads literally as separate numerical units joined by the conjunction ve ("and", H9002) rather than as a single compound numeral, a common feature of Biblical Hebrew numerical syntax.

The passive participle fekudei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) indicates that the men were subjected to an act of counting or registering; the grammar does not specify who performed the counting, only that these men are its result.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the two Hebrew nouns as "Cunctus exercitus pugnatorum ejus" ("the whole army of his warriors"), adding the term pugnatorum ("of warriors/fighters") and the qualifier cunctus ("whole/entire"), neither of which appears as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew text, which only has "his army" and "their enrolled men." The LXX (Swete) instead closely parallels the Hebrew structure with δύναμις αὐτοῦ ("his force") and οἱ ἐπεσκεμμένοι ("the ones reviewed/mustered"), matching the participial sense of fekudei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) more directly than the Vulgate's rendering.