Numbers 31:35

Summary

The verse records the total count of human captives taken from the Midianite plunder: women who had not had sexual intercourse with a man, numbering thirty-two thousand persons in all.

Key words

• Ne.fesh ("[the] person[s] of", H5315J) — feminine singular construct noun, here used to count human beings; it appears twice in the verse, first in construct with 'a.Dam ("humankind") and later as an absolute noun introducing the total tally.
• lo'-ya.de.'U ("they had not known", H3808 + H3045) — Qal perfect third person plural verb negated by lo', expressing a completed state prior to the narrated moment; the perfect aspect marks this as a settled fact about these women's past.
• mish.Kav ("lying of", H4904) — masculine singular construct noun forming a construct chain with za.Khar ("a male", H2145), together producing the idiom "lying of a male," i.e., sexual intercourse with a man.
• 'a.Sher ("who", H0834A) — relative particle introducing the subordinate clause that qualifies ha.Na.shim ("the women"), specifying which women are being counted.
• she.Na.yim u.she.lo.Shim 'A.lef ("two and thirty thousand", H8147 + H7970 + H0505G) — a compound cardinal number construction, literally "two and thirty, a thousand," yielding the total of 32,000.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence structure builds the count through a chain of construct and relative clauses. It opens with Ne.fesh 'a.Dam ("person of humankind"), a construct phrase that identifies the category being enumerated — human persons — before narrowing this to min-ha.Na.shim ("from the women"). The relative clause 'a.Sher lo'-ya.de.'U mish.Kav za.Khar ("who had not known the lying of a male") uses the Qal perfect verb ya.de.'U to state, as an established fact, that these women had not experienced sexual intercourse with a man; the construct chain mish.Kav za.Khar literally means "lying of a male," a fixed idiomatic expression for sexual relations.

The verse closes with a summarizing formula: kol-Ne.fesh ("every person" or "total of persons") followed by the compound number she.Na.yim u.she.lo.Shim 'A.lef ("two and thirty thousand"), giving the final tally of 32,000. The word Ne.fesh thus frames the verse twice — first identifying the class of captives, then totaling them — showing how Biblical Hebrew uses the same noun both to categorize and to count.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the phrase as animæ hominum sexus feminei ("souls of humans of female sex"), making explicit the grammatical gender that the Hebrew Ne.fesh 'a.Dam leaves implicit until the following clause specifies "from the women." The SBLIBRE Spanish translation adds "vírgenes" ("virgins"), a specifying term not present as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew, which instead conveys this sense only through the relative clause about not having known "the lying of a male."