What Does Numbers 26:41 Mean?
These are the sons of Benjamin after their families. And they that were numbered of them were forty and five thousand and six hundred.
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
These are the sons of Benjamin after their families: and they that were numbered of them were forty and five thousand and six hundred.THE KEY
The word translated “numbered” comes from a root that also means to attend to or appoint, so the count carries a sense of taking account, not just arithmetic.
THE MEANING
This verse lets you see a people as both a whole and a set of families: Benjamin’s descendants are counted, and their family lines remain in view. The number 45,600 makes their collective scale concrete without replacing the identity carried by those lines.
THE ROOT
פְקֻדֵיהֶם
pequdehem
GROWS FROM
פקד
p-q-d
Attend to, take account of; by extension, muster, register, or appoint.
The form פְקֻדֵיהֶם (pequdehem, “their mustered or registered ones”) comes from פקד (paqad), a root spanning attending to, appointing, and mustering. English “numbered” foregrounds arithmetic; the Hebrew word family connects registering a people with the wider act of taking account of them.
ALSO GROWS
paqad: Attend to, take account of; also number or muster.
פָּקַד
This verb belongs to the same root family as the census term, linking the total with taking account.
pequddah: Charge, oversight, appointment, or mustering.
פְּקֻדָּה
The root can name an entrusted office as well as a muster, widening the idea from tally to ordered responsibility.
THE PATTERN
A count can gather many into one view while keeping their distinct lines or names visible.
Lift up the head of all the assembly of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, by the number of their names, every male, head by head.He counts the number of the stars; he calls each of them by name.But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not shrink, for you surpass many sparrows.THE THREAD
And the LORD visited Hannah, so that she conceived, and bore three sons and two daughters. And the child Samuel grew before the LORD.Here the same פקד (paqad, “attend to; take account of”) root appears as “visited.” Beside the census count, that shared root connects numbering with attending to someone.
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