Numbers 31:54

Summary

The verse reports that Moses and Eleazar the priest took the gold offered by the military commanders and brought it into the Tent of Meeting, where it stood as a memorial for the Israelites before Yehovah. It closes the episode of the war spoils described in the preceding verses of Numbers 31.

Key words

• va-yiqqach ("he took", H3947H) — qal wayyiqtol form marking sequential narrative action; grammatically singular but governs the compound subject "Moses and Eleazar."
• sarei ("commanders of", H8269) — masculine plural construct, linking to ha'alafim ("the thousands") and forming the phrase "commanders of the thousands and the hundreds."
• va-yavi'u ("they brought", H0935P) — hiphil (causative) wayyiqtol, "caused to come," describing the plural subject Moses and Eleazar bringing the gold into the tent.
• zikkaron ("a memorial", H2146) — masculine singular noun standing in apposition to the gold, without a preposition or verb connecting it grammatically to what precedes; its function (memorial of what, for whom) is established purely by the following prepositional phrases.
• lifnei ("before", H6440G) — construct form of "face," literally "to the face(s) of," used with YHWH to indicate the divine presence.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence chains two wayyiqtol verbs — va-yiqqach ("he took") and va-yavi'u ("they brought") — the standard narrative-continuation structure in Biblical Hebrew prose. Although the first verb is grammatically third-person singular, it takes the compound subject "Moses and Eleazar the priest" (Mosheh ve-El'azar ha-kohen), a common construction where the verb agrees with the nearer or primary subject. The direct object marker 'et (H0853) before "the gold" and again before "it" ('oto) marks the accusative in both clauses without adding lexical meaning.

The phrase zikkaron livnei-Yisra'el ("a memorial for the sons of Israel") uses the preposition li- ("for/to") to indicate beneficiary or dedication, but the Hebrew does not specify an action verb like "remember" — the noun zikkaron stands alone in apposition, leaving its exact function (a memorial of the victory, a witness-object, etc.) to be inferred from context rather than stated explicitly by the grammar.

Differences between versions

The LXXSWETE text as given appears fragmentary: it reads "Μωυσῆ ὁ ἱερεὺς" ("Moses the priest"), apparently merging or omitting Eleazar's separate designation as priest found in the Hebrew (ve-El'azar ha-kohen, "and Eleazar the priest"). The Greek clause listing "the commanders of thousands and of ..." breaks off before naming "hundreds," and the final clause "μνημόσυνον τῶν ἀντὶ κυρίου" is likewise truncated, lacking an explicit equivalent to "sons of Israel."

The Vulgate clause "in monimentum filiorum Israël coram Domino" renders zikkaron livnei-Yisra'el closely as "a memorial of the sons of Israel," matching the Hebrew's noun-plus-construct structure.

The Spanish SBLIBRE renders the same phrase interpretively as "para que Yehová recordara a los israelitas" ("so that Yehovah would remember the Israelites"), introducing a verb of remembering and making Yehovah the subject — an expansion not present as a finite verb in the Hebrew, which merely places the noun zikkaron ("memorial") before Yehovah's presence (lifnei YHWH) without stating who remembers whom.