Judges 20:44

Hebrew (Westminster Leningrad Codex)

English Translation

There fell of Benjamin eighteen thousand men; all these [were] men of valor.

World English Bible · Public Domain

Download a study sheet

One document with this verse’s original text, its word-by-word gloss line, the meaning frame, cross-references with their text, attributed commentary, and full source and license credits — printable, and it pastes into notes with its structure intact.

This verse Autodidact and up

Study sheet (.html) Plain text (.txt)

A passage Seminary Student

Up to 50 verses in one chapter. A passage sheet keeps up to 6 commentary sources and 12 cross-references per verse, in the order this page ranks them, and says so on the sheet whenever that leaves anything out. Ask for a single verse and you get the Autodidact verse sheet above.

Everything on this page stays free to read, with no account — the sheet is a download of what is already on screen, not access to it.

Want to remove ads? Support Godless Engineer

Word by word

More ways to search: Search by grammar → Find every occurrence → Compare this word →

Practice this passage: Drill this verse → Learn its vocabulary →

שְׁמֹנָֽה

shᵉmôneh

H8083

“eight”

Adjective, Cardinal number, Masculine, Singular, Absolute

Appears 109× in the Hebrew Bible
First appears at Genesis 5:4

Full BDB Definition

Origin: apparently from H8082 through the idea of plumpness

TWOT: 2411a

eight, eighth - eight (as cardinal number) - eighth (as ordinal number) - in combination with other numbers

About this verse

These counts appear in no published source. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged text and Lemma’s own curated glosses. What Lemma adds →

11: words
10: distinct lemmas
Historical: section

Grammatical profile

1 verb
5 nouns
3 adjectives
1 pronoun
1 particle

Verb forms

וַֽיִּפְּלוּ֙ Qal · Sequential Imperfect

Repetition

A word recurs within this verse — often emphatic in Hebrew:

אִ֑ישׁ man H376 ×2

Hebrew & Septuagint length

In English translation the verse runs 13 words from the Hebrew and 14 from the Septuagint (LXX English) — closely comparable.

A rough comparison of the two English renderings, which tokenize alike — not a word-level alignment.

Word counts can differ between the Hebrew and the Greek without any difference in meaning — e.g. the Hebrew direct-object marker אֵת has no separate Greek word, and Greek often adds the article ὁ.

In the original languages it is 11 Hebrew tokens and 13 Greek tokens — but the two are counted differently (Hebrew bundles its prefixes and suffixes into one token; the Greek is in lemma form), so that isn’t a like-for-like length.

Hebrew and Greek witnesses Masoretic Hebrew ↔ Greek Septuagint

The same verse in the two great witnesses to the Old Testament, shown verse-for-verse.

These are two independent witnesses, not word-aligned to each other, and the Septuagint is shown in lemma (dictionary) form.

Hebrew Judges 20:44 Masoretic · Westminster Leningrad Codex

וַֽיִּפְּלוּ֙ מִבִּנְיָמִ֔ן שְׁמֹנָֽה עָשָׂ֥ר אֶ֖לֶף אִ֑ישׁ אֶת כָּל אֵ֖לֶּה אַנְשֵׁי חָֽיִל

There fell of Benjamin eighteen thousand men; all these [were] men of valor.

World English Bible · Public Domain

Greek LXX Judges 20:44 Septuagint · lemma form

καί πίπτω ἀπό βενιαμίν δέκα ὀκτώ χιλιάς ἀνήρ ὁ πᾶς οὗτος ἀνήρ δύναμις

And there fell of Benjamin eighteen thousand men: all these were men of might.

LXX2012 (modern English Septuagint) · Public Domain

Hebrew: Westminster Leningrad Codex (CC BY 4.0). Greek: Septuagint (public domain); English from LXX2012 (modern English Septuagint) (Public Domain). How the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew →

Targum (Aramaic paraphrase)

The Targum is the ancient Jewish Aramaic paraphrase of the Hebrew Scriptures — an interpretive translation, not the Hebrew text itself. Onkelos (literal) and Pseudo-Jonathan (expansive) render the Torah, and Jonathan the Prophets. Coverage is partial: where no permissively-licensed English translation exists for a verse, only the Aramaic is shown. This is verse-level text, not a word-by-word alignment to the Hebrew.

Targum Jonathan Prophets (Joshua–Malachi)

וְאִתְקְטָלוּ מִדְבֵית בִּנְיָמִין תַּמְנַת עֲסַר אַלְפִין גַבְרָא יַת כָּל אִלֵין גַבְרָא עַבְדֵי קְרָבָא:

(no public-domain English translation for this verse)

Targum Jonathan — Aramaic: “Mikraot Gedolot” (public domain). English: “Sefaria Community Translation” (CC0 1.0 (public-domain dedication)); “London "Chaldee Paraphrase," 1871” (public domain). Text via Sefaria.

Commentary

Notes on Judges 20:44 from classic Christian and Jewish commentators (each source and its license shown beneath its notes). The classic Christian expositions comment on the surrounding passage and are grouped to its opening verse, so a note may address several verses; the Jewish commentaries on the Tanakh (Rashi and others) are per-verse, so they appear only where the commentator wrote on this verse.

Lemma curates 59 commentaries, every one of them public domain or Creative Commons licensed, each selected and text-cleaned for this edition rather than reprinted as found. About our sources →

Trapp's Complete Commentary

John Trapp

Jdg 20:44 And there fell of Benjamin eighteen thousand men; all these [were] men of valour.

Ver. 44. And there fell of Benjamin.] To wit, In the battle.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Joseph Benson's Commentary

Jdg 20:44-45. There fell eighteen thousand — Namely, in the field of battle. They gleaned of them five thousand — A metaphor from those who gather grapes or corn so cleanly and fully that they leave no relics for those who come after them. The Benjamites could not flee in a body, but scattered up and down the highways, where the Israelites picked up five thousand more and slew them.

Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne

44. eighteen thousand men] Contrast the number in Jdg_20:35 from B. The first half of the v. may be assigned to A, and connects with Jdg_20:47; the second half has found its way here from Jdg_20:46, probably by a copyist’s error.

The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

John Gill's Exposition

And they turned and fled toward the wilderness, unto the rock of Rimmon,.... Which signifies pomegranate; perhaps it was in the form of one, and may be the same as in Sa1 14:2 where Saul is said to be under a pomegranate tree, or under Rimmon, the rock Rimmon, for that is said to be near Gibeah, as this was. There was a village in the times of Jerom called Remmon, fifteen miles from Jerusalem to the north (c), but could not be near this rock to have its name from thence; hither the rest of the army fled for shelter:

and they gleaned of them in the highways five thousand men; who were scattered one from another, and as they were found in the highways, and picked up, they were slain one after another, just as ears of corn are gleaned one by one, after the harvest is got in, or as grapes in single berries, after the vintage is over:

and pursued hard after them unto Gidom; which perhaps had its name from the cutting off of the Benjaminites there:

and slew two thousand men of them; that is, 2000 more besides the 5000 before mentioned.

(c) De loc. Heb. fol. 94. B.

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations

There fell, to wit, in the field, or battle.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

The Pulpit Commentary

Vers. 44-46. And there fell, etc. The account in ver. 35, anticipating the details of the battle, had already given the gross number of casualties in the Benjamite army on this disastrous day as 25, 100. We now have the items of the account, viz., 18, 000 in the pursuit, in the open plain; 5000 in the highways, i.e. either the highways mentioned in ver. 31, or, as the expression gleaning rather intimates, the highways by which straggling bodies tried to reach any neighbouring cities after the great slaughter had taken place; and 2000 more who were making from Gidom; in all 25, 000, which is only 100 men short of the reckoning in ver. 35. The rock of Rimmon. See ver. 47, note. Gidom. Not elsewhere mentioned, nor identified with any modern name.

The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

John Wesley's Explanatory Notes

There fell - Namely, in the field, of battle.

John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.

Rashi

Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rashi)

There fell, from Binyomin, eighteen thousand troops In the field, in the thick of battle.

Rashi on the Tanakh — English translations: “The Judaica Press complete Tanach with Rashi, translated by A. J. Rosenberg” (CC BY 4.0); “Pentateuch with Rashi's commentary by M. Rosenbaum and A.M. Silbermann, 1929-1934” (public domain); “The Metsudah Tanach series, Lakewood, N.J” (CC BY 4.0); and “The Book of Joshua, Metsudah Publications, 1997” (CC BY 4.0). Text via Sefaria.

Lesson kit

Teaching starters — assembled from the data on this page, not authored interpretation. Every prompt links to the verse data it draws on. Edit before teaching.

Judges, in the Historical, opens this verse with 11 words (10 distinct Hebrew lemmas). Its most distinctive word is shᵉmôneh (“eight”). A historical commentator’s framing appears above. Read the whole chapter for the surrounding context.

Discussion questions

How does “eight” (shᵉmôneh) shape what this verse is saying?
“man” occurs 2× in this one verse. What is the effect of the repetition?
These translations render this verse differently; the difference is in the English rendering, not the original. What questions does that raise?
The verb «וַֽיִּפְּלוּ֙» is Qal Sequential Imperfect. How does its form color the action?
Reading how Trapp's Complete Commentary and Joseph Benson's Commentary read this verse, where do the two commentators agree and where do they part?

Things to notice

This verse counts 11 Hebrew ↔ 13 Greek words.
These translations choose different wording for 4 words in this verse.
“man” occurs 2× in this single verse.
10 distinct Hebrew lemmas span 11 words in this verse.