Numbers 30:7

Summary

Numbers 30:7 describes what happens when a married woman's husband learns of a vow or binding obligation she has made and does not object on the day he hears of it: her vows and self-imposed obligations remain valid. The verse frames this through two sequential verbs — hearing and staying silent — followed by the repeated verb "to stand" (validity) that opens and closes the second half of the sentence.

Key words

• sha.Ma' ("he will hear", H8085) — qal sequential perfect; continues the narrative chain begun in the preceding verses, marking the husband's act of hearing as the triggering event.
• he.che.Rish ("he will keep silent", H2790) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect; the causative stem frames silence not as mere absence of speech but as an active choice — he "causes himself to be silent" toward her.
• Ka.mu / ya.Ku.mu ("they will stand", H6965) — the same root appears twice: first as a sequential perfect (Ka.mu), then as an imperfect (ya.Ku.mu) at the very end of the verse. This doubling brackets the subject phrase ("her vows and her obligations... which she bound upon her self") between two forms of the verb "to stand," emphasizing validity.
• 'e.sa.Re. ("obligations", H0632) and 'a.se.Rah ("she has bound", H0631) — noun and verb share the same root, producing a wordplay: the "bindings" ('esarim) are what she "bound" ('as'rah) upon herself.
• naf.Sha ("her self", H5315) — construct form of nefesh, here meaning "self" or "person" rather than "soul" in an abstract sense; the obligation is said to rest "upon her self."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of sequential perfects (ve-shama', ve-hecherish, ve-qamu) that narrate a sequence of events: the husband hears, he stays silent, and consequently the vows stand. The phrase be-yom shome'o ("on the day of his hearing", using the infinitive construct shome'o with a pronominal suffix) restricts the silence to the same day as the hearing, tying the two actions together temporally in a way that a general translation like "hears of it" does not fully convey.

The final clause reverses normal word order: the subject ("her vows and her obligations which she bound upon her self") is placed between two occurrences of the root H6965 ("to stand"), first as qamu and then as yaqumu. This bracketing structure places emphasis on the standing/validity of the vows by stating it both before and after specifying what stands.

Differences between versions

The LXX and Vulgate texts supplied here describe a different scenario — a woman coming to have a husband and her vows being tied to that circumstance — rather than the Hebrew's scenario of a husband hearing and remaining silent on the day he hears. This suggests the verse numbering in the Greek and Latin traditions at this reference point corresponds to different Hebrew material than the MT text of Numbers 30:7 given above. The Spanish (RV1909, SBLIBRE) and English (BSB) renderings align in content with the Hebrew text presented, matching its sequence of hearing, silence, and the standing of the vows.