Numbers 31:26

Summary

Yehovah instructs Moses to take a census of the captured booty — both human captives and animals — from the war against Midian. The counting is to be carried out jointly by Moses, Eleazar the priest, and the heads of the ancestral houses of the congregation.

Key words

• Sa' ("lift up", H5375V) — qal imperative, masculine singular; a command addressed grammatically to one person, forming an idiom meaning "take a count/census."
• rosh ("head of", H7218L) — masculine singular construct; opens a construct chain with malqoach, together meaning "the sum/total of."
• malqoach ("booty of", H4455A) — masculine singular construct, linked to ha-shevi ("the captivity", H7628A) to specify what is being counted: the captured spoil.
• ba-adam / va-behemah ("among humankind" / "among livestock", H0120G / H0929) — two prepositional phrases marked by the article, dividing the booty into two categories, people and animals.
• atah ("you", H0859A) — independent personal pronoun, resuming and expanding the subject of the imperative to include Eleazar and the tribal leaders.

What the text says

The sentence opens with a single masculine singular imperative, Sa' ("lift up", H5375V), which by itself would address only one person — presumably Moses, continuing the divine speech begun in the preceding verses. The object of this command is a construct chain: rosh malqoach ha-shevi ("the head of the booty of the captivity"), an idiomatic way of saying "the total count of what was captured." This total is then specified as covering two domains, introduced by parallel prepositional phrases: ba-adam ("among humankind", H0120G) and u-va-behemah ("and among livestock", H0929), i.e., both human captives and animals.

After the object of the count is stated, the independent pronoun atah ("you", H0859A) reappears, followed by ve-El'azar ha-kohen ("and Eleazar the priest") and ve-ra'shei avot ha-edah ("and the heads of the fathers of the congregation", using two construct nouns, H7218H and H0001G, stacked before the article-bearing ha-edah, "the congregation", H5712). Although the verb Sa' is grammatically singular, this trailing list of additional subjects shows that the counting task is distributed among three parties: Moses, Eleazar, and the clan leaders — the singular imperative form does not restrict the action to Moses alone but simply reflects the initial addressee of the command.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the command as a plural imperative, Tollite ("take"), matching the three listed subjects (Moses, Eleazar, the leaders) grammatically, whereas the Hebrew Sa' (H5375V) is singular, addressed initially to one person with the others added afterward. The LXX uses Labe to kephalaion ("take the sum/total"), employing the abstract noun "kephalaion" for the Hebrew idiom rosh malqoach ("head of the booty"), replacing the Hebrew's bodily metaphor with a more abstract term for a total sum.