a clan: the group of people who belong together by shared descent, occupying the social tier between the tribe and the individual household
This word names the unit of kinship that sits between the large tribe and the small household. In the census and genealogy lists it works as a technical term of social organization: Israel divides into tribes, each tribe into clans, each clan into households. Land inheritance, military enrollment, and redemption rights all run along these clan lines, which is why the word appears so densely in Numbers 26, Joshua's allotment chapters, and Leviticus 25.
The same word stretches naturally in two directions. Toward the inside it can name any circle of close relatives, a man's own kindred, the family he married into, the kin who share a sacrifice, where the tone is warm and personal rather than administrative. Toward the outside it can name any people-group seen as a coherent social unit: the table of nations in Genesis 10 distributes the descendants of Noah into their families, and the prophets speak of all the families of the earth or the families of the north, meaning the gentile peoples regarded as organized, bounded groups.
A smaller cluster of uses in Chronicles applies the word to occupational associations, groups of craftsmen or scribes, where the shared bond may have been actual descent, a guild organized along family lines, or simply a long-standing communal identity. The word fits because the same idea of people who belong together by shared background stretches across all these uses.
No one English word covers the full range. "Clan" fits the formal kinship-unit sense; "family" or "kindred" fits the personal kin sense; "people" or "nation" fits the broadest use. Translators choose by context, which is why the same Hebrew word looks so different in a census list versus a prophetic address to the nations.