Numbers 36:10

Summary

The verse reports that the daughters of Zelophehad acted in compliance with the command that Yehovah had given to Moses. It closes a legal narrative by confirming that the instruction was carried out exactly as prescribed.

Key words

• tzivvah ("he had commanded", H6680) — piel perfect, third person masculine singular; the piel stem intensifies the verb, marking a formal, authoritative act of command rather than a casual request.
• Yehovah (H3068G) — proper name functioning as the subject of tzivvah; identifies the source of the command as the deity rather than Moses himself.
• ken ("so", H3651C) — adverb correlating with the opening ka'asher ("as", H0834D); together they form a comparative frame ("just as... so") that structures the whole verse around correspondence between command and execution.
• 'asu ("they did", H6213A) — qal perfect, third person common plural; a simple, unintensified verb of action, contrasting with the piel of tzivvah and marking straightforward compliance.
• benot ("daughters of", H1323G) — feminine plural construct noun, grammatically binding the following name Tzelofchad (H6765) to identify the subject who performed the action.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on a correlative pair: ka'asher ("as") opens the first clause and ken ("so") opens the second, creating a balanced structure of command and fulfillment. The first clause places tzivvah ("he had commanded") in the piel perfect, with Yehovah as subject and Mosheh ("Moses", H4872) as the one commanded, marked by the untranslated direct object marker 'et (H0853). The second clause reverses the verb stem to qal with 'asu ("they did"), and shifts the subject to benot Tzelofchad ("the daughters of Zelophehad"), a construct phrase that ties the plural verb to the specific women named in the surrounding narrative.

The grammatical contrast between the piel of tzivvah and the qal of 'asu reflects a common pattern in Biblical Hebrew legal and narrative texts: the intensive stem for the act of authoritative command, the simple stem for the act of carrying it out. The word order — command clause first, execution clause second, both anchored by the ka'asher...ken correlation — foregrounds the exactness of the correspondence between what was ordered and what was performed, without additional verbs of manner or degree beyond this syntactic parallelism.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate's ut a Domino separatæ sunt ("as they were set apart by the Lord") at the start of this verse reflects material connected to the preceding verse's content on inheritance separation, differing from the Hebrew, LXX, and other versions, which begin directly with the "as Yehovah commanded Moses" clause. The LXX (Κύριος, "Lord") and Vulgate (Domino, "Lord") both render the divine name Yehovah with a generic title rather than a proper name, consistent with their regular substitution practice.