Numbers 30:6

Summary

Numbers 30:6 (Hebrew numbering) presents a conditional case: if a woman becomes a wife while she still has vows or a rash utterance of her lips binding her, those obligations continue to apply to her under her new marital status. The verse sets up the legal scenario for what follows regarding a husband's authority over a wife's prior vows.

Key words

• hayo ("certainly [to belong]", H1961) — qal infinitive absolute paired with the following verb to intensify the action, marking the conditional as emphatic ("if she should indeed become...").
• tihyeh ("she will belong", H1961) — qal imperfect, 3rd person feminine singular, expressing the coming-to-be of the marital state.
• nedarei ("vows of", H5088) — masculine plural noun in construct form, linked to the suffix -ha ("her"), meaning "her vows."
• mivta ("rash utterance of", H4008) — masculine singular construct noun, forming a construct chain with sefatei ("lips", H8193G), itself dual in form (lips as a natural pair).
• asrah ("she has bound", H0631) — qal perfect, 3rd person feminine singular, denoting a completed act of self-obligation prior to the condition described in the verse.

What the text says

The verse opens with the compound conditional particle ve'im ("and if") followed by the doubled verbal construction hayo tihyeh: an infinitive absolute plus a finite imperfect of the same root, H1961 ("to be/belong"). This doubling is a common Biblical Hebrew device to underline certainty or emphasis in the condition — "if she should indeed become [a wife]" — rather than a simple hypothetical.

The clause then names two categories of prior obligation joined by o ("or", H0176A): nedareiha ("her vows") and mivta sefateiha ("the rash utterance of her lips"), the latter a construct chain where "utterance" belongs to "lips," and "lips" is grammatically dual, reflecting the paired body part. Both nouns carry the 3rd person feminine singular suffix -ha, tying them to the woman in question. A relative clause, asher asrah al-nafshah ("which she bound upon her soul/self"), closes the verse, using the qal perfect asrah to mark this binding as an already-completed act preceding the marriage described in the main clause. The idiom al-nafshah ("upon her self") is the standard Hebrew phrasing for self-imposed vow obligations in this chapter.

Differences between versions

The LXX and Vulgate texts supplied for comparison do not correspond in content to this Hebrew verse: they describe a father's refusal ("ἀνανεύων ἀνανεύσῃ ὁ πατὴρ," "contradixerit pater") invalidating vows, a scenario absent from the Hebrew wording given here, which instead concerns a woman's transition into marriage while under a vow. This suggests the LXX/Vulgate excerpts provided align with a different verse in the versification of this passage rather than with Numbers 30:6 as segmented in the Hebrew text. The RV1909, BSB, and SBLIBRE renderings, by contrast, match the Hebrew's content about marriage and vows made "with her lips."