Numbers 2:4

Summary

The verse gives the total military count for the group associated with this tribal division: the number of enrolled men amounts to seventy-four thousand six hundred. The sentence consists almost entirely of a numerical tally attached to two nouns describing the military body.

Key words

• tzeva ("military group", H6635A) — masculine singular construct noun, "host/army of...", linked to a following pronominal suffix indicating possession.
• fekudei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural construct, "those who were counted/mustered of...", indicating a completed act of enrollment.
• arba'ah ("four", H0702) — cardinal number, common gender singular, first element of the compound total (four-and-seventy).
• shesh ("six", H8337) — cardinal number, common gender singular construct, "six of...", linking to the following noun for hundreds.
• me'ot ("hundreds", H3967) — feminine plural cardinal, completing the phrase "six hundred."

What the text says

The verse is built from two construct nouns — tzeva ("military group", H6635A) with the suffix O ("his", H9023), and fekudei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) with the suffix Hem ("their", H9028) — followed by a string of numerals. The construct form of tzeva ("military group", H6635A) ties it grammatically to "his," meaning it belongs to the tribal leader or group named earlier in the chapter (not included in this excerpt), while fekudei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A), a passive participle, describes men who have undergone a formal military registration process.

The numeral sequence — arba'ah ("four", H0702), shiv'im ("seventy", H7657), 'elef ("thousand", H0505G), shesh ("six", H8337), me'ot ("hundreds", H3967) — is constructed by addition: four plus seventy equals seventy-four, multiplied by "thousand," then six hundred is added. This produces the total of 74,600. Hebrew numeral syntax often lists the smaller unit before the larger (four-and-seventy) before stating the multiplier "thousand," a pattern that does not always survive literally in translation but does not change the arithmetic value.

Differences between versions

The LXX (Septuagint) renders tzeva ("military group", H6635A) as δύναμις ("power/force") and fekudei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) as οἱ ἐπεσκεμμένοι ("those who were reviewed/inspected"), both nominal renderings without explicit possessive pronouns matching the Hebrew suffixes as closely. The Vulgate compresses the two Hebrew nouns into "summa pugnantium" ("the total of those fighting"), merging concepts of army and enrollment into a single summary phrase rather than preserving two separate construct nouns. All versions agree on the final numeral total of 74,600.