Numbers 30:11

Summary

The verse describes a married woman's vow becoming binding: her husband hears of it, remains silent, and does not restrain her. Under these conditions, all her vows and every self-imposed obligation she has bound upon herself will stand.

Key words

• sha.Ma' ("he will hear", H8085) — qal sequential perfect; the husband's act of hearing opens the legal condition.
• he.che.Rish ("he will keep silent", H2790) — hiphil sequential perfect; the causative stem frames silence as a deliberate, effective action rather than mere absence of speech.
• he.Ni' ("he forbade", H5106) — hiphil perfect negated by lo' ("not", H3808); the causative again marks an active restraining that, in this verse, does not occur.
• Ka.mu / ya.Kum ("they will stand" / "it will stand", H6965) — the same root appears twice, once as plural qal sequential perfect (for the vows) and once as singular qal imperfect (for the obligation), forming a structural frame around the verse.
• naf.Sha ("her self", H5315) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, marking the obligation as bound upon the woman's own person.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on a chain of three sequential perfect verbs — sha.Ma', he.che.Rish, and the negated he.Ni' — all governed by the initial narrative vav. This chain describes a single continuous scenario: the husband hears, stays silent, and does not forbid. Grammatically, the causative (hiphil) stems for "keep silent" and "forbid" present both silence and restraint as intentional acts on the husband's part, not passive states — the silence itself functions as an active non-intervention.

The consequence clause is marked by a return to the vav-sequential pattern with Ka.mu ("they will stand"), whose subject is kol-nedareiha ("all her vows", H5088 construct + suffix). This is followed by a parallel clause built with kol-issar ("every obligation", H0632) modified by a relative clause asher-asrah al-nafshah ("which she bound upon her self"), closing with the singular imperfect ya.Kum ("it will stand"). The repetition of the root qum ("to stand") at both the start and end of the consequence section creates a grammatical frame reinforcing the idea of validity/standing for both the plural vows and the singular obligation category.

Differences between versions

The LXX and Vulgate texts supplied for this verse number describe a different moment in the passage — the LXX renders "if in the house of her husband there is her vow or her binding oath against her soul," and the Vulgate reads "the wife, when she has bound herself in her husband's house by vow and oath." Neither of these texts corresponds to the Hebrew content given here, which concerns the husband's hearing, silence, and non-restraint, and the resulting validity of the vows. This indicates a divergence in how the verse's content is distributed across versification traditions rather than a translation variant within a single verse.