Numbers 2:34

Summary

The verse closes the census-and-camp-arrangement unit of Numbers 2 by stating that the Israelites did exactly what Yehovah commanded Moses: they camped by their standards and set out in the same order, each man according to his clan and ancestral house.

Key words

• va-ya'asu ("and they did", H6213A) — qal narrative verb (vav + prefix conjugation) marking the summary action that closes the chapter's instructions.
• ka-khol 'asher ("according to all that", H3605 + H0834A) — construct phrase introducing a comparative clause of total conformity to a prior command.
• tzivvah ("he had commanded", H6680) — piel perfect, an intensive stem denoting an authoritative, completed act of command.
• ken ("so", H3651C) — adverb repeated twice (lines 12 and 18), creating a correlative structure "as... so... and so..." that links command to execution.
• le-mishpechotav ("to his clans", H4940 + suffix) — construct noun with 3ms suffix, specifying individual affiliation within the larger tribal grouping.

What the text says

The sentence is built on a threefold correlative structure using ken ("so", H3651C): the comparative clause ke-khol 'asher tzivvah Yehovah 'et-Mosheh ("according to all that Yehovah had commanded Moses") governs two parallel result clauses — ken chanu le-digleihem ("so they camped by their standards") and ve-khen nasa'u ("and so they set out"). This grammatical repetition of ken creates a tight equivalence between divine instruction and human execution: the verbs chanu ("they camped", H2583) and nasa'u ("they set out", H5265), both qal perfects, present the camping and departure as completed, unified actions of the whole community, while the phrase ish le-mishpechotav 'al beit 'avotav ("each man to his clans, according to his father's house") shifts to the singular ish ("each man", H0376I) to specify that this collective obedience was carried out at the level of individual family units.

The verb tzivvah ("he commanded", H6680) is in the piel stem, which in this context denotes the solemn, authoritative nature of Yehovah's prior instruction rather than a casual request. The construct chains dig-lei-hem ("their standards"), mishpechotav ("his clans"), and beit 'avotav ("his father's house") each attach a possessive suffix, embedding the individual and family identity within the larger structure of tribal organization that the chapter has been describing.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders ka-khol 'asher tzivvah Yehovah as panta hosa synetaxen kyrios ("all that the Lord commanded"), omitting a direct equivalent for 'et-Mosheh ("Moses") in this clause as printed here, and uses tagma ("order/rank") where the Hebrew has degel ("standard", within le-digleihem). The Vulgate's castrametati sunt per turmas suas ("they camped by their troops") renders degel as turma ("troop/squadron"), a military term not identical to "standard" or "banner." Both LXX and Vulgate preserve the twofold structure of camping and setting out but do not reproduce the Hebrew's repeated adverb ken ("so") as an explicit correlative marker.