Numbers 2:8

Summary

The verse gives the total headcount for a tribal military division within the census structure of Numbers 2: "his division" and "his enrolled men" numbered fifty-seven thousand four hundred. It is a pure numerical summary, continuing the count from the preceding verse without naming the tribe again.

Key words

• tzeva ("military group", H6635A) — masculine singular construct with pronominal suffix o ("his"), forming "his division/host"; construct state links it grammatically to an implied referent (the tribe named in the prior verse).
• fekuDav ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural construct with suffix "his"; a participle used substantively, denoting those who have been counted/mustered, in construct like tzeva.
• shiv'ah ("seven", H7651) — cardinal number, common gender singular; begins the numeral sequence in units-first order.
• 'Elef ("thousand", H0505G) — cardinal number, common gender singular, marking the thousands unit after the tens (chamishim, "fifty").
• me'ot ("hundreds", H3967) — feminine plural cardinal, in construct with 'arba' ("four", H0702), producing "four hundred" as the final component of the total.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence has no independent verb; it is a nominal construction listing two coordinated construct phrases — u-tzevao ("and his division") and u-fekuDav ("and his enrolled men") — followed immediately by the numeral sequence that quantifies both. The construct chains lack an explicit head noun for the possessive suffix "his" within this verse alone; the referent (a tribal leader or tribe) is supplied by the surrounding context in Numbers 2, not by this verse in isolation.

The numeral order follows the pattern units + tens + thousands + hundreds: shiv'ah ("seven") + chamishim ("fifty") + 'elef ("thousand") + 'arba' ("four") + me'ot ("hundreds"), yielding 57,400. This ordering — smaller number stated before the larger when both apply to the same order of magnitude (seven-and-fifty, i.e., fifty-seven) — is a standard Hebrew numeral syntax and differs from the units-tens-hundreds-thousands sequence used in English.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders tzeva as δύναμις ("power," "force") and fekuDav as οἱ ἐπεσκεμμένοι ("the ones reviewed/inspected"), presenting them as two distinct grammatical subjects rather than as parallel construct phrases sharing a suffixed possessor. The Vulgate collapses the two Hebrew terms into a single phrase, "exercitus pugnatorum" ("army of fighters"), using a genitive construction that merges tzeva and fekuDav into one image of an army of combatants, without preserving the separate "enrolled" sense of the participle fekuDav.