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The Tribe of Ephraim
Numbers 26:35–37 — The Tribe of Ephraim. Each verse below carries the full apparatus: the Berean Standard Bible, the vocalized original (tap any word), and a parsed breakdown of every term transcribed from the interlinear. Synthesized commentary, canonical threads, and the reading of Christ gather at the end, over the whole unit.
35These were the descendants of Ephraim by their clans: The Shuthelahite clan from Shuthelah, the Becherite clan from Becher, and the Tahanite clan from Tahan.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
’êl·leh ḇə·nê- ’ep̄·ra·yim lə·miš·pə·ḥō·ṯām haš·šu·ṯal·ḥî miš·pa·ḥaṯ lə·šū·ṯe·laḥ hab·baḵ·rî miš·pa·ḥaṯ lə·ḇe·ḵer hat·ta·ḥă·nî miš·pa·ḥaṯ lə·ṯa·ḥan
Literal — word-for-word from the original
“These [were] the-sons-of Ephraim by-their-clans: of-Shuthelah, the-clan-of the-Shuthelahite; of-Becher, the-clan-of the-Becherite; of-Tahan, the-clan-of the-Tahanite.”
Where the English smooths the original
The sons of Ephraim. These formed but four families, three named after sons, one after a grandson. In 1 Chronicles 7:21 two other sons of Ephraim are mentioned who were killed in their father's lifetime, and a third, Beriah, who was the ancestor of Joshua.
There were four families descended from Ephraim; three from his sons, and one from his grandson. Of the descendants of Sutelah several links are given in 1 Chronicles 7:20 .
Becher, called also Bered , 1 Chronicles 7:20 .Poole notes the variant name across the parallel genealogy in Chronicles.
36And the descendants of Shuthelah were the Eranite clan from Eran.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
wə·’êl·leh bə·nê šū·ṯā·laḥ hā·‘ê·rā·nî miš·pa·ḥaṯ lə·‘ê·rān
Literal — word-for-word from the original
“And these [were] the-sons-of Shuthelah: of-Eran, the-clan-of the-Eranite.”
Where the English smooths the original
Eran, called Edan or Laadan , 1 Chronicles 7:26 ; the letters daleth and resh being alike in the Hebrew tongue, and therefore oft changed, as is evident from Scripture instances.An early, sober note on textual transmission: name-variants explained by the visual near-identity of ד and ר.
There were four families descended from Ephraim; three from his sons, and one from his grandson.The Eranite of this verse is that fourth, grandson-descended family.
only from the former sprung another family, called the EraniteGill names the relationship this verse records: the Eranite is the one clan descended not from Ephraim directly but from his son Shuthelah (“the former”).
And these are the sons of Shuthelah: of Eran, the family of the Eranites.The Geneva note simply restates the verse — preserving the older spelling of the clan.
37These were the clans of Ephraim, and their registration numbered 32,500. These clans were the descendants of Joseph.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
’êl·leh miš·pə·ḥōṯ bə·nê- ’ep̄·ra·yim lip̄·qu·ḏê·hem šə·na·yim ū·šə·lō·šîm ’e·lep̄ wa·ḥă·mêš mê·’ō·wṯ ’êl·leh lə·miš·pə·ḥō·ṯām ḇə·nê- yō·w·sêp̄
Literal — word-for-word from the original
“These [were] the-clans-of the-sons-of Ephraim by-their-musterings: two-and-thirty thousand and-five hundred. These [were] by-their-clans the-sons-of Joseph.”
Where the English smooths the original
Thirty and two thousand and five hundred.— This shows a decrease of 8,000. Jacob foretold that Ephraim should be greater than Manasseh ( Genesis 48:19 ); and at the former census the number of the Ephraimites was considerably greater than that of the Manassites ( Numbers 1:33 ; Numbers 1:35 ), and Ephraim was made a standard-bearer ( Numbers 2:18 ).
The sons of Ephraim — Ephraim, though in future times a tribe flourishing much more than its brother-tribe Manasseh, ( Deuteronomy 33:17 ,) was now, for some cause, it appears, upon the declension, their poll being decreased eight thousand. See Numbers 1:33 .
the number of the whole was 32,500; there was a decrease in this tribe of 8000.Trimmed to the arithmetic Gill draws from the figure.
The total was nearly the same as when numbered at mount Sinai. Notice is here taken of the children of Korah; they died not, as the children of Dathan and Abiram; they seem not to have joined even their own father in rebellion. If we partake not of the sins of sinners, we shall not partake of their plagues.Henry on the whole chapter; the closing maxim is his reading of the census as a moral ledger.
The verse-by-verse work is done. What follows gathers the whole unit. All three layers below are machine-generated (⚙). Weigh them; they have no authority.
AI synthesis — woven from the public-domain voices above and the original text; generated and fallible.
Three verses of pure genealogy — “of Shuthelah, the clan of the Shuthelahite; of Becher, the clan of the Becherite” — and the temptation is to skim. Matthew Henry refuses to: he reads the whole muster as the moment when “the families [are] registered, as well as the tribes,” a roll where God “did not number the people but when God commanded him.” The Hebrew makes the same point structurally. The refrain לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָם (mišpāḥāh, H4940, “by their clans”) tolls eleven times across these three verses; the demonstrative אֵלֶּה (“these”) opens and closes the Ephraim entry like a seal. This is not an archive. It is a covenant people being counted by name on the threshold of the land.
Every public-domain hand agrees on the arithmetic of the household. Keil & Delitzsch: “There were four families descended from Ephraim; three from his sons, and one from his grandson.” The Pulpit Commentary fills in the shadow behind the list — that 1 Chronicles 7:21 names two other sons of Ephraim … who were killed in their father’s lifetime, and a third, Beriah, “the ancestor of Joshua,” who founded no separate clan. So the registry is also a record of loss: families that began and did not continue. The grammar of v. 36 marks the one branch that did go deeper — וְאֵלֶּה בְּנֵי שׁוּתָלַח, “and these are the sons of Shuthelah” — drilling a generation down to the lone grandson-clan, the Eranite.
The total lands hard: שְׁנַיִם וּשְׁלֹשִׁים אֶלֶף וַחֲמֵשׁ מֵאוֹת — 32,500. Gill, Ellicott, and Benson all do the subtraction against the first census of Numbers 1:33 (40,500) and arrive at the same wound: “a decrease in this tribe of 8000” (Gill). The word governing the count is לִפְקֻדֵיהֶם (pāqad, H6485) — not a neutral “registration” but a visiting, mustering, calling-to-account. The same root tracks the wilderness generation that fell. Ellicott then notices the deep irony: Ephraim is shrinking here, yet “Jacob foretold that Ephraim should be greater than Manasseh” (Genesis 48:19), and Moses, even now, ascribes to him the “ten thousands of Ephraim” (Deuteronomy 33:17). The numbers dip; the promise holds. The verse closes by gathering both halves of Joseph’s house under one name — בְּנֵי יוֹסֵף, “the sons of Joseph” — the double portion of the firstborn made flesh in two tribes (1 Chronicles 5:1–2).
Read under Scripture alone, the census is a theology of faithfulness that outlasts arithmetic. Ephraim is down eight thousand — and the text neither hides it nor explains it away; it simply records the smaller number and keeps the older promise (Genesis 48:19; Deuteronomy 33:17) standing, unrevised, in the same canon. That is the pattern: God’s word about a people is not indexed to that people’s headcount in any given year. The very verb of the muster, pāqad, “to visit / attend to,” insists that being counted by God is being known by Him — a chain of named clans, each tied to a real ancestor, none lost in the aggregate. And the list’s buried footnote is the heaviest weight in it: Beriah of Ephraim, who founded no famous family, is “the ancestor of Joshua” (Pulpit Commentary) — the savior-named man who will lead this very people across the Jordan. The smallest entries carry the largest providence. This is the tool’s fallible reading; weigh it against the Word itself.
The numbers fell by eight thousand; the promise did not move an inch — and the man who would cross the Jordan was hidden in a clan too small to name. (A reading to be tested, not a verse.)
AI-generated connections. Each carries a verification badge with a recorded basis; contested links are flagged.
The Chronicler returns to this exact household and extends it: “The sons of Ephraim: Shuthelah … of the descendants of Sutelah several links are given” (K&D on 1 Chronicles 7:20). The link is genuinely verbal, not merely topical — the name Shuthelah (Shûwthelach) occurs in only four verses in all of Scripture, and two of them are this Chronicles passage. A rare lexeme shared between two genealogies is the strongest kind of verbal tie.
1 Chronicles 7:20 · 1 Chronicles 7:21
basis: rare shared lexeme H7803 Shûwthelach (in only 4 vv canon-wide) plus H669 ʼEphrayim; Verifier-confirmed Hebrew↔Hebrew verbal link, 1 Chr 7:20 also sharing H669
The clan-father Tahan (Tachan) of v. 35 surfaces again in the Chronicler’s Ephraim genealogy. This is the rarest lexeme in the unit: the name Tachan appears in exactly two verses in the entire Hebrew Bible — here and 1 Chronicles 7:25. When a proper name that scarce reappears, the verbal connection is about as certain as a cross-reference can be.
1 Chronicles 7:25
basis: rare shared lexeme H8465 Tachan (in only 2 vv canon-wide); Verifier-confirmed Hebrew↔Hebrew verbal link
The name Becher (Beker, H1071) is rare — only four verses in all of Scripture — and the Verifier flags it as a shared lexeme between this verse and Genesis 46:21; 1 Chronicles 7:6, 7:8. But honesty cuts against the obvious inference: the Becher of Numbers 26:35 is a son of Ephraim, while the Becher of Genesis 46:21 and 1 Chronicles 7 is a son of Benjamin. The shared word is genuine; the person is not. This is precisely the trap a bare Strong’s match sets — a rare name reused for two different men — and the reader should treat the link as lexical only, never as identifying one ancestor across the passages.
Genesis 46:21 · 1 Chronicles 7:6 · 1 Chronicles 7:8
basis: Verifier reports a rare shared lexeme (H1071 Beker, in only 4 vv) — but the referents differ: Ephraim's son here vs. Benjamin's son in Gen 46:21 / 1 Chr 7. Verbal match, distinct persons; flagged so the homonym is not mistaken for a single ancestor
The same tribe was numbered at Sinai a generation earlier at 40,500 (Numbers 1:33); here it stands at 32,500 — the decrease of 8,000 that Gill, Ellicott, and Benson all record. The Verifier finds the two musters of Ephraim sharing the census verb pāqad (H6485), the tribal name ’Eprayim (H669), and the very number-words of the total (’elep̄, ḥāmêš, mêʼâh), which is what makes the comparison a structural parallel built into the text’s own vocabulary, not an inference imposed on it. No quotation is claimed — only the same mustering-formula run twice over the same tribe, a generation apart, with a different result.
Numbers 1:33
basis: Verifier-confirmed shared census vocabulary across the two Ephraim musters: H6485 pâqad, H669 ʼEphrayim, H2568 châmêsh, H505 ʼeleph, H3967 mêʼâh — common terms, so structural/thematic not verbal; no quotation claimed
Ellicott and Benson both reach past the deficit to Moses’ blessing: even as Ephraim shrinks, the LORD through Moses speaks of the “ten thousands of Ephraim” set above the “thousands of Manasseh” (Deuteronomy 33:17). The two passages share Ephraim (H669) and the word ’elep̄ (“thousand,” H505) — a thematic, motif-level link (census number vs. blessing-hyperbole), not a quotation, so it is tiered structural rather than verbal.
Deuteronomy 33:17
basis: shared lexemes H669 ʼEphrayim and H505 ʼeleph (common, freq 391) — a thematic motif of Ephraim's numbers, not a quotation; Verifier-confirmed structural
Ellicott grounds the whole irony of the passage in Jacob’s deathbed word that the younger Ephraim would surpass the elder Manasseh (Genesis 48:19). The connection is real and ancient in the interpretive tradition — but it must be argued, because the Verifier finds no shared original-language lexeme between Numbers 26:37 and Genesis 48:19. Honesty requires flagging it: this is a commentator’s thematic synthesis, persuasive but not anchored in shared words, and the reader should test it against both texts.
Genesis 48:19
basis: Verifier found NO shared original-language lexeme; the Ephraim-over-Manasseh link is Ellicott's thematic argument (defensible, traditional) but not a verbal connection — verify before relying on it as a textual cross-reference
AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.
The Pulpit Commentary surfaces the buried name behind this very genealogy: Beriah, an Ephraimite who “does not seem to have founded a separate family,” yet “was the ancestor of Joshua” — and indeed the Chronicler’s parallel runs the Ephraim line down to “Joshua his son” (1 Chronicles 7:27). So the savior-named leader — Yəhôšua‘, “the LORD saves,” which is Ἰησοῦς, Jesus, in Greek (Acts 7:45; Hebrews 4:8) — rises out of the tribe being counted here, indeed out of a line too obscure to found a clan of its own in the muster. The one who will bring Israel across the Jordan into the inheritance is already latent in Numbers 26, in a household the list itself does not enumerate. That the deliverer is hidden in the least is a pattern the New Testament makes explicit (cf. the rest God’s people did not obtain through Joshua, Hebrews 4:8). Note: this is a typological reading of an ancient genealogical link, not a claim that Numbers 26:35 verbally cites the New Testament.
Numbers 26:35 · 1 Chronicles 7:27 · Hebrews 4:8
The unit closes by reckoning both Ephraim and Manasseh as “the sons of Joseph” (v. 37) — Joseph receiving, through his two sons, the double portion of the firstborn (1 Chronicles 5:1–2). The church has long read Joseph as a type of Christ: the rejected and exalted brother who becomes the savior of his people, whose inheritance is doubled and shared out. Here that birthright is literally multiplied into a household, a foretaste of the firstborn among many brethren (Romans 8:29; Colossians 1:15, 18) into whose inheritance the many are gathered.
Numbers 26:37 · 1 Chronicles 5:1 · Colossians 1:18
The biblical text is the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), public domain (CC0). Hebrew/Greek text, transliteration, morphology and Strong’s are transcribed from the Berean interlinear (CC0) + Strong’s lexicons (PD); the literal renderings, divergence notes, word notes and all synthesis are this tool’s own work (⚙) — fallible; verify them.
Named voices, quoted verbatim from public-domain works:
This unit is three verses of census genealogy (Numbers 26:35–37), the Ephraim entry in the second wilderness muster. Several public-domain commentaries in the source set are chapter-level notes keyed to 26:1–51 (Henry) or to other tribes in the chapter (Jamieson-Fausset-Brown’s note is on Simeon, v. 12; Barnes’ on the sons of Korah, v. 58) and so do not bear directly on the Ephraimite clans; those have been used sparingly and only where a genuinely general claim applies. Poole offers no note on v. 37 in the source. The Geneva note merely restates the verse. The thread tiers are taken from the Verifier’s computed bases: the 1 Chronicles 7 links to Shuthelah (in 4 verses) and Tahan (in only 2) rest on genuinely rare shared names and are therefore verbal; the Numbers 1:33 and Deuteronomy 33:17 links rest on common census/number vocabulary and are tiered structural. Two links are deliberately flagged: the Genesis 48:19 “Ephraim > Manasseh” connection, though traditional and exegetically defensible (Ellicott), has no shared original-language lexeme and is a thematic argument, not a verbal tie; and the Becher link (a rare shared name, H1071, in only 4 verses) is flagged because the Verifier’s lexical match conceals a homonym — Ephraim’s son Becher here versus Benjamin’s son Becher in Genesis 46:21 and 1 Chronicles 7, a verbal coincidence between two different men. The Joshua and Joseph readings are placed in the Christ section as typological/figural (ancient, widely-held), not asserted as verbal cross-references, since the Old Testament–to–New links cannot rest on shared Strong’s numbers. Every voice above is a verbatim, contiguous excerpt of the supplied public-domain text, trimmed only at the ends.
✦ = human, public-domain source, quoted and named. ⚙ = machine synthesis, to be verified. Flagged cross-references are left visible on purpose — the verifier working in the open. “Search the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” (Acts 17:11)