Numbers 4:44

Summary

Numbers 4:44 gives the total count of men enrolled by their clans, reporting a final figure of three thousand two hundred. The verse functions as the closing tally of a census section concerning a specific Levitical group.

Key words

• va-yihyu ("and they were", H1961) — narrative vav plus qal verb, third person masculine plural, marking this as the continuation and conclusion of a preceding narrative sequence.
• fequdei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — passive participle in construct form, meaning "the ones counted/enrolled of," setting up a possessive chain with the following suffix.
• mishpechotam ("their clans", H4940) — feminine plural noun in construct with pronominal suffix, specifying that the enrollment was organized by clan units.
• sheloshet ("three", H7969) — cardinal number in construct form, grammatically bound to the following noun "thousand."
• ma'tayim ("two hundred", H3967) — feminine dual form, the standard Hebrew way of expressing "two hundred" as a doubled unit of "hundred."

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative vav construction va-yihyu ("and they were"), which continues the flow of the census account rather than beginning a new independent statement. The subject is fequdeihem ("their enrolled [men]"), a passive participle in construct state carrying a third-person masculine plural suffix, meaning "the enrolled ones of them." This phrase is followed by le-mishpechotam ("to/by their clans"), using the preposition le ("to", H9005) attached to the construct noun mishpechot with its own suffix, indicating the organizing principle of the count — the men were tallied according to clan divisions.

The numerical total follows in construct chain form: sheloshet alafim ("three of thousands") literally reads as "three-of thousand[s]," a standard Hebrew construction for expressing multiples of a base number. The conjunction u ("and", H9002) links this to ma'tayim ("two hundred"), which appears in the feminine dual form — the grammatically expected form for "two hundred" in Hebrew, since "hundred" (me'ah) is feminine and the dual marks a pair of that unit. The full numeral thus reads "three thousand and two hundred," yielding the total of 3,200 individuals.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (et inventi sunt tria millia ducenti, "and there were found three thousand two hundred") omits an explicit rendering of le-mishpechotam ("by their clans"), stating only the total number without repeating the clan qualifier explicit in the Hebrew. The LXX (Septuagint), by contrast, expands the phrase with κατὰ δήμους αὐτῶν, κατ’ οἴκους πατριῶν αὐτῶν ("according to their clans, according to the houses of their fathers"), adding a parallel phrase about ancestral houses not present in the Hebrew construct chain fequdeihem le-mishpechotam. Modern translations such as the BSB and RV1909/SBLIBRE follow the Hebrew structure closely, preserving both the clan reference and the numeral.