Numbers 2:6

Summary

The verse records a numerical total for a military division: "his army" and "his enrolled [men]" total fifty-four thousand four hundred. No verb is present; the sentence consists entirely of construct nouns followed by a chain of cardinal numbers.

Key words

• tzeva'o ("his military group", H6635A) — masculine singular noun in construct state with a pronominal suffix ("his"), naming the counted body as a "host" or "division."
• fekudav ("his enrolled [men]", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural, construct, with suffix; grammatically it functions as a noun meaning "those who were mustered/counted," standing in apposition to tzeva'o.
• arba'ah ("four", H0702) — cardinal number, common gender, combined with the next word to form "fifty-four."
• chamishim ("fifty", H2572) — cardinal number, masculine plural form, joined to arba'ah by the conjunction va- ("and") to produce the compound number 54.
• me'ot ("hundreds", H3967) — feminine plural cardinal, following arba' ("four") in construct to yield "four hundred."

What the text says

The Hebrew clause has no finite verb; it is a nominal sentence built from two paired nouns — tzeva'o and fekudav — each carrying the third-person masculine singular suffix "his," referring back to a tribal leader named earlier in the chapter's sequence. Both nouns are in construct form, which in this context does not link to another noun but to the numeral that follows, producing a reading close to "his host, [namely] his mustered men — fifty-four thousand four hundred." The apposition of tzeva ("host, army") and the participle fekudav ("the ones counted/enrolled") gives two overlapping designations for the same counted group: one emphasizing its military character, the other its status as a formally registered population.

The numeral itself is built in the customary Hebrew order of units before tens before thousands: arba'ah ("four") plus chamishim ("fifty") joined by va- gives 54, then 'elef ("thousand") multiplies this, and finally ve-arba' me'ot ("and four hundred") adds the remainder, yielding 54,400.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the two Hebrew nouns as δύναμις ("force") and οἱ ἐπεσκεμμένοι ("the ones reviewed/counted"), keeping the same two-part structure as the Hebrew tzeva / fekudav pairing. The Vulgate collapses this into a single phrase, omnis numerus pugnatorum ejus ("the whole number of his fighters"), merging host and mustered-men into one expression centered on "fighters" (pugnatorum) rather than preserving two distinct terms.