Numbers 25:9

Summary

This verse reports the total number of people who died in the plague described in the preceding narrative: twenty-four thousand. It functions as a closing statistical statement, marking the end of the plague episode with a numerical tally.

Key words

• va-yihyu ("and they were", H1961) — qal narrative form, third person masculine plural, continuing the story with a simple past-tense report ("and so they were/came to be").
• ha-metim ("the ones who died", H4191) — qal participle with definite article, functioning as a substantive: "the dead" or "those dying," describing an ongoing state/group rather than a single completed action.
• ba-maggephah ("in the plague", H4046) — feminine singular noun with prefixed preposition and article, marking the specific plague already referenced earlier in the narrative context (the definite article assumes the reader/hearer knows which plague).
• arba'ah ("four", H0702) and esrim ("twenty", H6242) — cardinal numbers combined to form "twenty-four," here modifying elef ("thousand", H0505G) to state the total count.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative vav-consecutive form va-yihyu ("and they were"), a common way in Biblical Hebrew narrative to link this statement to the preceding events as a direct continuation. The subject is ha-metim ("the [ones who] died"), a definite participle that treats "the dead" as a collective, known group — grammatically it does not simply say "people died" but designates a specific, identifiable set: those who died in this plague.

The phrase ba-maggephah ("in the plague") uses the definite article on maggephah ("plague," H4046), pointing back to a plague already introduced in the surrounding narrative rather than a new or general plague. The numeral construction arba'ah ve-esrim alef ("four and twenty, a thousand") follows the standard Hebrew numeral order of smaller unit before ten before the noun counted, yielding "twenty-four thousand." Unlike English, Hebrew numerals here are not simply concatenated as "24" but built as "four-and-twenty," a structure that does not affect the meaning but reflects a different arithmetic-linguistic convention.

The overall sentence structure is compact: subject (the definite participle "the dead"), locative/causal phrase ("in the plague"), and numeral predicate ("twenty-four thousand"), with no separate verb of dying beyond the participle itself — the participle ha-metim already carries the semantic weight of "having died" or "dying," while va-yihyu supplies the narrative tense.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (et occisi sunt, "and they were killed") uses a passive verb implying violent death, differing from the Hebrew's participial construction ha-metim ("the ones who died"), which does not specify killing versus dying from the plague itself. The LXX (ἐγένοντο οἱ τεθνηκότες, "there came to be those who had died") more closely mirrors the Hebrew's participial and narrative structure than the Vulgate's more active phrasing.