a son: a male child, and by extension a descendant or a member of a group
At its core this is the word for a son, a male child of his parents. From there it widens naturally: a man's "sons" are his descendants, and "the sons of Israel" can mean a whole people descended from one ancestor.
Hebrew also uses it for belonging and likeness. To be a "son of" something is to belong to its group or to be marked by its quality, so "sons of the prophets" are members of a prophetic circle and "son of man" simply means a human being.
It even works with numbers to give age: someone "a son of a year" is one year old. So the one word reaches from a literal child to descent, membership, and age, all held together by the idea of deriving from a source.
Nuances
Whether Deuteronomy 32:8 reads "sons of Israel" (this sense) or "sons of God," which would place it under a different sense entirely.
- majority"according to the number of the sons of Israel" (the Masoretic Text).; Masoretic Text (BHS)
- minority"according to the number of the sons of God" (divine beings), found in a Qumran manuscript and the Old Greek.; 4QDeutj (Dead Sea Scrolls); Septuagint (Old Greek)