Numbers 31:53

Summary

The verse states that the soldiers of the army had taken plunder, each man for himself. It functions as an explanatory note, clarifying that ordinary combatants kept their own individual spoils (in contrast to the gold offering described in the surrounding verses, which came from officers).

Key words

• anshei ("men of", H0582) — masculine plural construct, linking to tzava to form "men of the army," i.e., the rank-and-file soldiers.
• tzava ("army", H6635A) — masculine singular noun designating the military host as a body.
• bazezu ("they had taken plunder", H0962) — qal perfect, third person plural, denoting a completed collective action prior to the narrative moment being described.
• ish ("everyone", H0376I) — masculine singular noun used distributively; despite being singular, it applies individually to each member of the plural subject already stated.
• lo ("for himself", H9033) — preposition with pronominal suffix, marking personal benefit or possession, reinforcing that each soldier acted for his own gain.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence places the subject anshei hatzava ("the men of the army") first, followed by the verb bazezu ("they had taken plunder") in the qal perfect, indicating an already-completed action. The final phrase, ish lo ("each one, for himself"), is a distributive apposition: ish ("each man") restates the plural subject in singular form to stress individuality, while lo ("for himself") specifies that the plundering benefited each soldier personally rather than the group as a whole. This grammatical pattern — a collective plural subject followed by a distributive singular — is common in Biblical Hebrew for indicating that an action, though performed collectively, had individual, not communal, distribution of its outcome.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders tzava ("army") with οἱ πολεμισταί ("the warriors" or "fighting men"), a term emphasizing combat role rather than the more neutral Hebrew "army." It also uses ἐπρονόμευσαν ("plundered/foraged"), a different verb root than the Hebrew bazezu, though similar in meaning. Its ἕκαστος ἑαυτῷ ("each for himself") closely mirrors the Hebrew ish lo.

The Vulgate restructures the verse more substantially: "Unusquisque enim quod in praeda rapuerat, suum erat" ("For whatever each one had seized in plunder was his own"). Where the Hebrew and LXX describe the act of plundering, the Vulgate shifts to a statement about legal possession ("was his own"), and adds the causal conjunction "enim" ("for"), framing the verse as an explanation of ownership rather than a report of the plundering action itself.