Numbers 4:23

Summary

This verse defines the age range for enrolling members of the Gershonite clan for service at the Tent of Meeting, setting the boundaries at thirty and fifty years. It specifies that those counted are those who "come" to perform the labor of service within the sanctuary structure.

Key words

• tif.Kod ("you will enroll", H6485A) — qal imperfect, second person masculine singular, indicating an ongoing or future instruction directed at Moses (or the addressee of the census command).
• Ba' ("[one who] goes", H0935G) — qal participle masculine singular, describing a class of person defined by continuous or characteristic action ("the one who comes/enters"), functioning almost as a noun ("entrant").
• tz.Vo' ("serve", H6633) — qal infinitive, paired with the cognate noun tza.Va' ("service", H6635I), forming a verb-noun repetition (infinitive + its own noun) that intensifies the sense of "serving in service."
• 'a.Vod ("serve", H5647H) — qal infinitive, paired similarly with 'a.vo.Dah ("service", H5656H), a second infinitive-plus-noun construction parallel to the first.
• Ben ("a son of", H1121L) — construct noun used idiomatically with a number of years to express age ("a son of thirty years" = thirty years old), appearing twice to mark both boundaries of the range.

What the text says

The verse is built on a temporal frame introduced by mi ("from", H9006) and 'ad ("to", H5704), bracketing the age range: Ben shelo.Shim shanah ("a son of thirty years") extended by va.Ma'.lah ("and upward", H4605+H9011, a directional construction meaning "and beyond") up to Ben chami.Shim shanah ("a son of fifty years"). This "son of X years" idiom (Ben + cardinal number + shanah) is a standard Hebrew way of stating age, literally treating the person as belonging to a count of years.

The core instruction is carried by the verb tif.Kod ("you will enroll"), a qal imperfect that projects an action to be carried out on the object marked by 'et...them (H0853 + suffix, an untranslated marker attaching to the pronoun "them"). The class being enrolled is defined by the participle Ba' ("the one who goes/enters"), modifying kol ("every", H3605) with the definite article, so the phrase reads "every one who enters."

The purpose clause doubles an infinitive construction with its cognate noun: litz.Vo' tza.Va' ("to serve [in] service") and la.'a.Vod 'avo.Dah ("to serve [in] service"), using two different Hebrew roots (H6633/H6635I and H5647H/H5656H) that are both conventionally rendered "service" in English but represent distinct lexical items in the source text. This double infinitive-noun pairing is a feature of Biblical Hebrew syntax that intensifies or specifies the nature of the activity, a nuance that is largely flattened in translation since both pairs are rendered with the same English word "service."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the lower age boundary as pente kai eikosaetous ("twenty-five years") where the Hebrew text has shelo.Shim ("thirty", H7970), a numerical divergence between the Greek and Hebrew textual traditions. The Vulgate follows the Hebrew reading of "thirty" (triginta annis). The LXX also compresses the double infinitive-noun construction of the Hebrew (litz.Vo' tza.Va' / la.'a.Vod 'avo.Dah) into a single phrase, leitourgein, poiein ta erga autou ("to minister, to do his works"), not preserving the repeated infinitive-cognate pattern found in the Hebrew source text.