From the people of Israel’s half renders the same Hebrew expression as in verse 42, so Revised Standard Version places long dashes around verses 43-46, forming one long sentence. Some languages will prefer to break up verses 42-47 into several sentences (so Good News Translation).

Moses took one of every fifty is literally “Moses took … the one drawn from the fifty” (see verse 30), which means he took 1/50 of the booty given to the Israelite community.

Both of persons and of beasts: See the comments on verses 11 and 26. As in verse 26, the generic Hebrew word for persons refers to the Midianite virgins whose lives had been spared (verses 18 and 35), but it is better to keep a generic rendering for the contrastive word pair persons and beasts. Good News Translation loses the contrast by saying “prisoners and animals.” A better model is “people and animals” (New International Readers Version).

And gave them to the Levites who had charge of the tabernacle of the LORD: See verse 30.

As the LORD commanded Moses: See verse 31.

Quoted with permission from de Regt, Lénart J. and Wendland, Ernst R. A Handbook on Numbers. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2016. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .