Numbers 31:33

Summary

This fragment records a numeral entry in the tally of war spoils taken from Midian: the count of cattle, given as seventy-two thousand head. The verse consists solely of a noun and its accompanying compound number, part of a longer enumeration of livestock and captives.

Key words

• va.Kar ("cattle", H1241) — common gender singular noun used collectively to denote the category of animals being counted, not a specific individual animal.
• she.Na.yim ("two", H8147) — cardinal number in the dual form, here functioning as the units component of the compound number "two and seventy."
• shiv.'Im ("seventy", H7657) — cardinal number, masculine plural form, serving as the tens component of the total.
• 'A.lef ("thousand", H0505G) — common gender singular noun indicating the multiplier "thousand," applied to the preceding compound number to yield the full total.

What the text says

The Hebrew constructs the number through a sequence of independent numeral words rather than a single fused numeral, as is typical in Biblical Hebrew for large figures. The order is literally "cattle, two and seventy, thousand" — the units (she.Na.yim, "two") precede the tens (shiv.'Im, "seventy"), joined by the conjunction ve- ("and", H9002), and the whole compound number is then multiplied by 'A.lef ("thousand"). This produces the value 72,000, distributed across the syntax as "two-and-seventy thousand" rather than "seventy-two thousand" as an idiomatic English or Spanish reader would phrase it.

The noun va.Kar ("cattle", H1241) stands at the head of the clause, preceded by the conjunction u- ("and", H9002) linking this item to a prior element in the list (likely the preceding category of livestock or spoils enumerated earlier in the verse sequence). Because va.Kar is grammatically singular despite referring to a plural quantity of animals, the noun functions as a collective term, a common feature of Biblical Hebrew when referring to herd animals as a category rather than as counted individuals.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew places the units before the tens ("two and seventy thousand"), a structure preserved literally in the Vulgate's boum septuaginta duo millia word order variation, though the Vulgate reverses to "seventy [and] two thousand of oxen." The LXX (Swete) renders the same sequence as δύο καὶ ἑβδομήκοντα χιλιάδες ("two and seventy thousand"), following the Hebrew order of units before tens. Modern translations (RV1909, BSB, SBLIBRE) uniformly convert this to the natural target-language numeral order "seventy-two thousand," which does not preserve the Hebrew's units-then-tens sequence but conveys the same numerical value.