What Does Numbers 26:39 Mean?
Of Shupham, the family of the Shuphamites. Of Hupham, the family of the Huphamites.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Of Shupham, the family of the Shuphamites: of Hupham, the family of the Huphamites.THE KEY
Each name becomes a family identity: Shupham and Hupham are carried forward by the people named after them.
THE MEANING
A name can extend beyond the person who first bears it. Here, Shupham and Hupham stand as names carried by families, with belonging shown as a continuing relation rather than a solitary identity.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the idea that a name belongs only to the person who first bears it; a family can keep carrying that name.
THE ROOT
מִשְׁפָּחָה
mishpāḥāh
GROWS FROM
שׁפח
The root’s basic sense is uncertain; מִשְׁפָּחָה (mishpāḥāh) means family or clan.
The verse repeats מִשְׁפָּחָה (mishpāḥāh, family or clan), joining each personal name to a continuing kin group. The etymology behind the noun is uncertain, so the clearest connection is in the wording itself: each name is echoed in the family identity that carries it.
ALSO GROWS
mishpāḥōt: Families or clans.
מִשְׁפָּחוֹת
The plural form shows how one kin-group identity can multiply into many.
ləmišpəḥōtām: According to their families or clans.
לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָם
This inflected form appears in Numbers 1:18, where people are counted by family, showing the same word grouping individuals into kinship lines.
THE PATTERN
A personal name can continue as the shared identity of a family or people.
From these were the coastlands of the nations parted in their lands, each by his tongue, by their families, in their nations.And they gathered all the assembly together on the first day of the second month, and they declared their births after their families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of the names, from twenty years old and upward, head by head.After this I see, and look, a great crowd that no one can number, from every nation and tribe and people and tongue, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, wrapped in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.THE THREAD
From these were the coastlands of the nations parted in their lands, each by his tongue, by their families, in their nations.Both verses use מִשְׁפָּחָה (mishpāḥāh, family or clan), here in forms referring to families. Genesis shows those kin groups among the ways a people is carried and recognized, opening the two names in Numbers into a wider pattern.
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