וַיֹּ֨אמֶר מֹשֶׁ֤ה אֶל־יְהוֹשֻׁ֙עַ֙ בְּחַר־לָ֣נוּ אֲנָשִׁ֔ים וְצֵ֖א הִלָּחֵ֣ם בַּעֲמָלֵ֑ק
Moses said to Joshua, “Pick some troops for us, and go out and do battle with Amalek.…”
(The above rendering comes from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation. Before accounting for this rendering, I will analyze the plain sense of the Hebrew term אִישׁ—in this case, its plural form—by employing a situation-oriented construal as outlined in this introduction, pp. 11–16.)
As speaker, Moses is issuing a directive. In doing so, he describes in schematic fashion what he would like to happen. This is the prototypical environment for employing the situating noun: it relates the essential participant(s) to the situation (or event) that is being depicted.
Moses is using bare אֲנָשִׁים to perform one of its typical discourse functions—namely, to introduce into the discourse an unquantified subset of a known group (see under Test #3 in Stein 2021). He is speaking elliptically; the group in view is the Israelite militia, which goes without saying, given the immediate mention of engaging in battle.
Ibn Ezra (in his longer commentary) sees אֲנָשִׁים here as meaning “experienced, valiant, proven fighters.” Attributing such meaning to this noun thus accounts for why Moses said here to “choose” the troops; after all, one must have criteria in order to make a selection. Yet in this instance, expertise as the qualification is actually left as a matter of implication. It is not part of the meaning contribution of the noun itself.
In short, Moses uses a term that has relatively little semantic content, because that suffices to get the basic message across quickly. Joshua will know what to do.
As for rendering into English, the NJPS ‘some men’ is no longer idiomatic as a way to refer to troops; it places undue emphasis on their gender. There is no warrant for a gendered rendering, because the male-only nature of the militia goes without saying.
In today’s U.S. army, the inclusive term “soldiers” is used instead of “men” (Chaplain [Captain] Howard M. Fields, personal communication, 11/30/04). In that spirit, I selected a relatively general, one-word designation for a nation’s nonprofessional representatives in a battlefield setting.