וַיֹּ֤אמֶר הַמַּלְאָךְ֙ אֶל־דָּוִ֔ד כִּֽי־גָבְר֤וּ עָלֵ֙ינוּ֙ הָאֲנָשִׁ֔ים וַיֵּצְא֥וּ אֵלֵ֖ינוּ הַשָּׂדֶ֑ה וַנִּהְיֶ֥ה עֲלֵיהֶ֖ם עַד־פֶּ֥תַח הַשָּֽׁעַר׃
The messenger said to David, “First their men prevailed against us and sallied out against us into the open; then we drove them back up to the entrance to the gate.
(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 containing אִישׁ—in this case, its plural form אֲנָשִׁים—by employing a situation-oriented construal as outlined in “Notes on Gender in Translation,” pp. 11–16.)
The speaker labels the enemy with the situating noun. He thus prompts his audience (King David) to regard the referent in terms of their constitutive participation in the depicted situation—treating the presence of enemy soldiers in that situation as highly given. Such underspecified usage relies upon the audience to infer the intended referent via considerations of salience. This is an efficient, and therefore normal, approach to communication about situations of interest.
As for rendering into English, the NJPS ‘the men’ drew upon the corresponding discourse role of the English situating noun men. However, such usage of men has faded in recent years relative to its gendered-sortal usages, thus making it harder for readers to fix the intended reference here. Apparently this problem is what has prompted some translations to render הָאֲנָשִׁים here as ‘the enemy’ (REB, CEV, NLT). In the present context, however, using a possessive pronoun suffices to make the reference clear. Its relational nuance evokes the original situational meaning of men.