Numbers 4:38

וּפְקוּדֵי בְּנֵי גֵרְשׁוֹן לְמִשְׁפְּחוֹתָם וּלְבֵית אֲבֹתָֽם׃

✦ Hebrew interlinear

Tap a word to see its entry

✦ The same verse in five languages

Hebrew

וּפְקוּדֵ֖י בְּנֵ֣י גֵרְשׁ֑וֹן לְמִשְׁפְּחוֹתָ֖ם וּלְבֵ֥ית אֲבֹתָֽם׃

Greek (Septuagint)

Καὶ ἐπεσκέπησαν υἱοὶ Γεδσὼν κατὰ δήμους αὐτῶν, κατ’ οἴκους πατριῶν αὐτῶν,

Greek text from Swete's edition, CC BY-SA 4.0

Latin (Vulgate)

Numerati sunt et filii Gerson per cognationes et domos patrum suorum,

Spanish

Los que fueron contados de los hijos de Gersón, por sus familias y por las casas de sus padres,

Classic Spanish (Reina-Valera 1909)

Y los contados de los hijos de Gersón, por sus familias, y por las casas de sus padres,

English

Then the Gershonites were numbered by their clans and families,

✦ What the text says

Summary

The verse begins the census summary for the Gershonite branch of the Levites, stating that the enrolled men of the descendants of Gershon are counted according to their clans and according to their ancestral house.

Key words

fekudei ("[the] enrolled [men] of", H6485A) — a qal passive participle in construct form; it designates those who have been counted/mustered, functioning as the subject of the census statement and grammatically linking to "descendants of Gershon."
benei ("[the] descendants of", H1121G) — masculine plural construct of "sons," here meaning descendants; it forms a construct chain with Gershon, identifying which group is being enumerated.
Gershon ("Gershon", H1648) — the proper name of the Levitical ancestor, marking the specific lineage under review in this part of the census.
mishpechotam ("clans", H4940) — feminine plural construct noun with the third-person masculine plural suffix "their," indicating the subdivision unit (clan) by which the count is organized.
beit avotam ("house of ancestors", H1004M + H0001G) — a construct phrase, "house of their fathers," designating the ancestral household as the second organizing category alongside clan.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built almost entirely through construct chains (semikhut), a grammatical feature that links nouns without a separate word for "of." The chain fekudei benei Gershon ("the enrolled of the descendants of Gershon") stacks three nouns together: the passive participle fekudei governs benei, which itself governs the proper name Gershon. This produces a single dense phrase meaning "the counted men who are descendants of Gershon," with no finite verb "to count" appearing — the participle itself carries the sense of an action already completed and applied to its subject.

The verse then specifies two organizing categories for this count, each introduced by the preposition le ("to/according to"): lemishpechotam ("according to their clans") and uleveit avotam ("and according to the house of their ancestors"). Both phrases carry the third-person masculine plural suffix -am ("their"), referring back to the Gershonite descendants. The repetition of le before each category shows that the census is being cross-classified by two nested kinship structures — clan and ancestral house — rather than by a single grouping.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders Gershon as Gedsōn, a transliteration variant of the Hebrew name. The Vulgate's Numerati sunt ("they were numbered") uses a finite passive verb form, making explicit in Latin what the Hebrew participle fekudei leaves as a nominal construction rather than a full clause.

This explanation describes the text using linguistic data; it adds no doctrine or confessional interpretation.