TO SUBTRACT — to take an amount off a total, withhold a share, leave somebody short. ⭐ It is the verb of every petition in the book of Numbers. Three times somebody comes to Moses with a grievance and states it with this word, and three times the petitioner wins: at Numbers 9:7 men made unclean by a corpse ask why they should be subtracted from the Passover; at Numbers 27:4 the daughters of Zelophehad ask why their father’s NAME should be subtracted from his clan; at Numbers 36:3 their own clansmen use it twice about the land the ruling gave them. A corpse-contact, a dead man’s name and a parcel of ground, all measured with one accountant’s verb. ⚠ No version on either shelf uses a single word in all three places, so the thread is invisible in translation: the ASV comes closest with ‘kept back’ then ‘taken away’ twice, the KJV spends ‘kept back’, ‘done away’ and ‘taken from’, the NWT 1984 ‘restrained’, ‘taken away’, ‘withdrawn’. ⚠ This translation does not manage it either — the Hebrew spans withholding a PERSON and subtracting a QUANTITY, and English has no one word for both — so it prints ‘subtracted’ where the sum is explicit and says where the seam is rather than manufacturing an echo. ⚠ Elsewhere the verb is ordinary: Exodus 5:8 orders that nothing be subtracted from the Israelites’ quota of bricks and 5:11 that nothing be subtracted from their work, and Exodus 21:10 forbids a husband to subtract his first wife’s food, clothing or conjugal right — a marriage law, which is what Numbers 36 turns out to be about. → first discussed at Num 36:3