Revised Standard Version continues the sentence here started in verse 3, but it will be better in many languages to begin a new sentence at this point. Good News Translation radically restructures this verse to make it sound more natural in English. And at the same time the expressions in their generations and according to their fathers’ houses are left implicit.

Along with them is literally “on them.” La Bible Pléiade takes the Hebrew to mean “the duties that fell on them” and translates “It fell on them … to provide armed troops for war.” Most others give the rare meaning of “besides” to the Hebrew preposition here, as the context seems to require. “In addition to” the five clan leaders in verse 3, there were many others in Uzzi’s clan who were available for military duty. New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh says “together with them.”

By their generations, according to their fathers’ houses: The word fathers is to be understood in the sense of “ancestors” while houses refers to families or clans. For these two phrases Parola Del Signore: La Bibbia in Lingua Corrente has “According to their family registries.” Moffatt is similar with “duly entered in the family genealogies.” Nouvelle Bible Segond provides a good model, saying “according to their ancestry, family by family.”

Were units of the army for war, thirty-six thousand, for they had many wives and sons: The Hebrew noun translated units is a general term for a band or group of persons. This noun sometimes refers to bands of robbers, but it also may refer to the number of individuals provided for military service, as it does here. The army for war sounds redundant in modern English. When the word army is used, there is no need to specify that it is for war. The overall idea in this verse is that the descendants of the five men mentioned in verse 3 furnished a fighting force of 36,000 soldiers.

It is difficult to make sense of the numbers in verses 1-5. The Masoretic Text seems to say that the descendants of Tola had 22,600 men ready to fight. But verse 4 says that Uzzi, one of Tola’s descendants, had 36,000. Are the descendants of Uzzi not counted among the descendants of Tola? And how is verse 5 connected to verse 4? Does the number 87,000 refer to all the warriors in the tribe of Issachar or only to the rest of the tribe who are not included in verses 2-4?

Some scholars take the clause for they had many wives and sons with the first part of the next verse and read “4 … because they had more wives and sons 5 than their brothers…” (American Bible; similarly New American Bible). This is also the suggestion of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, which proposes that the Hebrew preposition meaning “from/than” (only one letter in Hebrew) was accidentally omitted from the beginning of verse 5. If translators accept this correction of the Masoretic Text, they may follow New American Bible‘s model for verses 4-5, which says:

4 Their kindred, by ancestral houses, numbered thirty-six thousand men in organized military troops, since they had more wives and sons 5 than their fellow tribesmen. In all the clans of Issachar there was a total of eighty-seven thousand warriors in their family records.

With the proposed correction of the Masoretic Text, the meaning is that the descendants of Uzzi had 36,000 men available for fighting, but the rest of the tribe of Issachar had only 51,000 men available, for a total of 87,000.

Quoted with permission from Omanson, Roger L. and Ellington, John E. A Handbook on 1-2 Chronicles, Volume 1. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2014. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .