Numbers 4:49

Summary

Numbers 4:49 closes the census unit for the Levitical clans, stating that the enrollment of each man was carried out "by the mouth of YHWH" and "by the hand of Moses," with each individual assigned according to his specific service and burden, in accordance with what YHWH had commanded Moses.

Key words

• pi ("mouth of", H6310I) — construct form used idiomatically in the phrase al-pi ("upon the mouth of"), meaning "according to the command of," here referring to YHWH.
• pa.Kad ("he enrolled", H6485A) — qal perfect, third-person masculine singular. The grammatical subject is not explicitly named in this clause; it is connected to Moses only through the following instrumental phrase.
• 'ish 'ish ("a man a man", H0376G, repeated) — the doubling of the same singular noun produces a distributive sense, "each man" or "every single one," without any distributive particle needed.
• fe.ku.Da ("enrolled [men] of", H6485A) — qal passive participle, masculine plural construct, from the same root as pa.Kad. It functions as a noun meaning "those enrolled" or "his mustered ones," carrying a 3ms possessive suffix.
• tzi.Vah ("he had commanded", H6680) — piel perfect. The intensive stem here conveys a formal, authoritative act of command, distinguishing it from a simple qal verb of speaking.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of prepositional phrases anchored to two verbs: pa.Kad ("he enrolled") and tzi.Vah ("he had commanded"). The opening phrase al-pi Yehovah ("according to the mouth of YHWH") sets the authority behind the census, while be.yad Mosheh ("by the hand of Moses") identifies the human agent through whom the counting was executed. Grammatically, the subject of pa.Kad is not stated as a separate noun — it is a bare third-person verb form — so the Hebrew leaves open whether YHWH or an unspecified enrolling agency is the doer, with Moses introduced only as instrumental "hand."

The distributive phrase ish ish ("a man, a man") repeats the same noun (H0376G) to indicate that each individual was treated separately, according to his own avodato ("his service") and masa'o ("his burden"), both nouns bearing third-person singular possessive suffixes. The participle fekuday ("his enrolled ones") reuses the root of pa.Kad, forming a kind of grammatical echo between the act of enrolling and its resulting roster. The final clause repeats tzi.Vah ... et-Mosheh, closing the verse by re-anchoring the entire procedure in YHWH's command to Moses.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate makes the grammatical subject explicit: recensuit eos Moyses ("Moses reviewed them"), naming Moses as the one performing the census. The Hebrew, by contrast, leaves the subject of pa.Kad unstated, introducing Moses only through the instrumental phrase be.yad ("by the hand of"). The LXX similarly renders an active verb, epeskepsato ("he numbered"), followed later by a passive form, epeskepēsan ("they were numbered"), which parallels the Hebrew participle fekuday but shifts it into a full passive clause rather than a construct noun phrase.