Joshua 8:3-5
New American Bible (Revised Edition)
3 So Joshua and all the soldiers prepared to attack Ai. Picking out thirty thousand warriors,[a] Joshua sent them off by night 4 with these orders: “See that you ambush the city from the rear. Do not be very far from the city. All of you must be ready. 5 The rest of the people and I will come up to the city, and when they make a sortie against us as they did the last time, we will flee from them.
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- 8:3 Thirty thousand warriors: this figure of the Hebrew text, which seems extremely high, may be due to a copyist’s error; some manuscripts of the Septuagint have “three thousand,” which is the number of the whole army in the first, unsuccessful attack (7:4); the variant reading in v. 12 mentions “five thousand.” More likely, the word for “thousand” here and in other military contexts may designate a squad or fighting unit, itself composed of significantly fewer warriors.
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