Numbers 30:4

Summary

The verse describes the legal consequence when a father hears his daughter's vow and says nothing: the vow and the binding obligation she placed on herself remain valid. The sentence uses a chain of sequential verb forms to link hearing, silence, and validation into one continuous legal process.

Key words

• sha.Ma' ("he will hear", H8085G) — qal sequential perfect; opens the conditional chain, marking the father's awareness as the triggering event.
• nid.Rah ("her vow", H5088) and 'e.sa.Rah ("her obligation", H0632) — two masculine singular construct nouns with the pronominal suffix -Rah ("her"), paired terms denoting a spoken promise and a self-imposed binding restriction.
• he.che.Rish ("he will keep silent", H2790B) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect; the causative stem frames silence as an active, legally consequential act rather than mere absence of speech.
• Ka.mu ("they will stand", H6965I) — qal sequential perfect, plural, referring to "all her vows" (kol-nedareiha); expresses that the vows acquire binding force.
• ya.Kum ("it will stand", H6965I) — qal imperfect (not sequential), closing the verse; the shift from perfect to imperfect marks a summarizing, general statement rather than a step in the narrative chain.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a sequence of vav-prefixed perfect verbs (ve-shama, ve-hecherish, ve-qamu) that read almost like a legal protocol: "and he will hear... and he will keep silent... and they will stand." Each verb depends on the one before it, so the syntax itself enacts the causal chain — hearing leads to silence, silence leads to validity. The two terms neder ("vow") and 'issar ("obligation"), each attached to 'al-nafshah ("on her self"), are repeated in near-identical phrasing at the start and the end of the verse, framing the entire unit as a single legal formula rather than two separate statements.

The final verb, yaqum ("it will stand", H6965I), breaks the sequential-perfect pattern and shifts to a plain imperfect. This grammatical shift sets it apart as a summarizing clause rather than another link in the narrative chain, restating in general terms what the preceding sequence had already established for the plural "all her vows."

Differences between versions

The LXX text supplied for this reference does not correspond to the Hebrew content given; it speaks of a vow "in the house of her father... in her youth," which matches subject matter found elsewhere in Numbers 30 rather than the father's hearing-and-silence sequence described here. The Vulgate, by contrast, closely tracks the Hebrew structure, rendering hecherish as tacuerit ("he has been silent") and qamu/yaqum as forms of "remaining binding" (rea erit), preserving the same hearing–silence–validity sequence found in the Hebrew.