Numbers 26:64

Summary

Numbers 26:64 states that among the men counted in the second census, none belonged to the group previously enrolled by Moses and Aaron the priest, who had earlier counted the Israelites in the wilderness of Sinai. The verse marks a generational discontinuity between two censuses using the same verbal root for "counting."

Key words

• Ha.yah ("he was", H1961) — qal perfect, third person masculine singular; expresses a completed state, here negated by lo' ("not", H3808) to assert total absence: "there was not."
• pe.ku.Dei ("[the] enrolled [men] of", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural construct; nominalizes the verb "to count/enroll," describing the men as objects of a prior enrollment, tied to mo.Sheh ("Moses", H4872).
• pa.ke.Du ("they had enrolled", H6485A) — qal perfect, third person plural, same root as pe.ku.Dei but active and finite; describes the act of counting performed by Moses and Aaron.
• 'Ish ("anyone", H0376I) — masculine singular noun functioning as an indefinite pronoun under negation, meaning "not a single man."
• 'et (untranslated, H0853) — direct object marker preceding be.Nei Yis.ra.'El ("the people of Israel", H1121G + H3478), marking the object of the counting.

What the text says

The sentence opens with u-ve-'Elleh lo'-Hayah 'Ish ("and among these there was not a man"), a negated existential clause that sets up the contrast: of those now present, none came from the earlier group. The identity of that earlier group is specified by mi-pekudei Mosheh ve-Aharon ha-Kohen ("from the enrolled of Moses and Aaron the priest"), using the passive participle pekudei to designate a fixed, closed category of men who had already been counted at an earlier time.

The relative clause 'asher paqedu 'et-benei Yisra'el bemidbar Sinai ("who had enrolled the sons of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai") repeats the same root (H6485A) in a finite perfect verb, paqedu, describing the act of enrolling performed by Moses and Aaron. This double use of one root — once as a passive participle naming the counted men, once as an active perfect verb naming the act of counting — creates a wordplay in Hebrew that most translations render with two different English verbs ("numbered" / "counted"), losing the repetition of the same root visible in the source text.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate adds a temporal marker not explicit in the Hebrew: ante numerati sunt ("were numbered before"), making the earlier census's priority more explicit than the Hebrero perfect alone requires. The LXX renders pekudei Mosheh as τῶν ἐπεσκεμμένων ὑπὸ Μωυσῆ ("those reviewed/mustered by Moses"), using ἐπισκέπτομαι for both Hebrew verb forms, similarly collapsing the participle/perfect distinction present in the Hebrew. The SBLIBRE Spanish translation adds "no quedó vivo" ("none remained alive"), an interpretive expansion not present in the Hebrew lo'-hayah 'ish ("there was not a man"), which states absence without specifying death as the cause.