Numbers 31:5

Summary

The verse reports that men were selected from the "thousands of Israel," at a rate of one thousand per tribe, totaling twelve thousand armed men prepared for war. The Hebrew verb form frames this as something that happened to the men (passive), rather than an action a leader performed on them.

Key words

• yimmasru ("they were selected/handed over", H4560) — niphal (passive/reflexive) verb; the men are the grammatical subject of an action done to them, not agents doing the choosing themselves.
• alfei ("thousands of", H0505G) — construct plural, linking directly to Yisrael, so the phrase reads "the thousands of Israel," a term for Israel's mustered population.
• elef ("one thousand", H0505G) — cardinal number repeated twice in the verse (once distributively per tribe, once in the final total of twelve thousand), showing how the count is built from smaller units.
• lammatteh ("to the tribe", H9005+H4294H) — preposition with article and singular noun; used distributively, meaning "for each tribe," not "for the tribe" as a single collective.
• chalutzei ("armed men of", H2502B) — qal passive participle in construct form, describing men as "equipped/drawn out for" what follows, here modified by tzava ("war", H6635H).

What the text says

The sentence's backbone is the niphal verb yimmasru, which places the men in the passive role of being "selected" or "handed over" — the Hebrew grammar does not specify who performs the selecting, only that it happens to the men described. This is followed by the source of the men, me'alfei Yisrael ("from the thousands of Israel"), a construct phrase treating "Israel" as a collective body organized into numbered military divisions.

The distributive phrase elef lammatteh ("a thousand to the tribe") uses the preposition la not to mean "for the tribe" as a single entity but "per tribe," a common Hebrew idiom for repeated distribution across a group — a nuance that requires translations to add words like "per" or "each" since Hebrew accomplishes it with a bare preposition and singular noun. The total, sheneim asar elef ("twelve thousand"), is then described in construct with chalutzei tzava, literally "armed [ones] of war" — the participle chalutzei is passive in form (from a root associated with drawing out or equipping), describing the men as those drawn out and outfitted for battle.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew niphal yimmasru ("they were selected/handed over") is passive, leaving the agent unspecified. The LXX renders this with an active verb, exērithmēsan ("they numbered out"), shifting the grammatical focus to an unnamed group performing a counting action. The Vulgate similarly uses an active verb, dederunt ("they gave"), also supplying an implied active subject where the Hebrew has no stated agent.