Numbers 36:4

Summary

This verse continues the objection raised by the heads of Manasseh's clans about the daughters of Zelophehad's inheritance. It states that if the yobel ("jubilee", H3104) occurs, the women's inheritance will be permanently absorbed into whichever tribe they marry into, and correspondingly subtracted from the ancestral tribe's inheritance.

Key words

• yoVel ("jubilee", H3104) — definite singular noun (with article ha-), naming the specific jubilee year as the trigger condition for the clause.
• nosFah ("it will be added", H3254) — niphal (passive) sequential perfect, feminine; the passive voice frames the inheritance as being acted upon rather than acting, and the sequential form links this clause causally to the preceding conditional.
• nachalaTan ("their inheritance", H5159 + suffix) — feminine singular construct with 3fp suffix, appearing twice (once as subject of nosFah, once as subject of yigaRa'), forming a grammatical frame around the verse.
• tihYeinah ("they will belong", H1961) — qal imperfect, 3fp, referring back to nachalat ha-matteh ("inheritance of the tribe"); the plural feminine form agrees with the daughters as the implied subject of belonging.
• yigaRa' ("it will be withdrawn", H1639) — niphal imperfect, masculine singular verb governing the feminine noun nachalaTan that follows it; the niphal again casts the inheritance as passively diminished.

What the text says

The sentence opens with a conditional clause, ve-'im yihYeh ha-yoVel ("and if the jubilee will be"), setting up a temporal-legal condition. The apodosis begins with the narrative/sequential vav on nosFah ("and it will be added"), a niphal perfect that expresses the passive addition of the women's inheritance to the receiving tribe's holdings. The phrase 'al nachalat ha-matteh ("to the inheritance of the tribe") uses a construct chain to specify whose inheritance receives the addition, followed by a relative clause 'asher tihYeinah lahem ("which will belong to them") clarifying that this is the tribe into which the women have become wives.

The second half of the verse mirrors the first structurally but reverses the direction of movement: u-mi-nachalat matteh 'avoTeinu ("and from the inheritance of the tribe of our fathers") marks the source tribe using the preposition min ("from"), and the niphal imperfect yigaRa' ("it will be withdrawn") describes the resulting loss. The repetition of nachalatan ("their inheritance") at the end mirrors its earlier appearance, framing the verse around the same passive noun-verb pairing (nosFah...yigaRa') to show addition on one side and subtraction on the other as two aspects of a single transfer.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders ha-yoVel ("the jubilee") as ἄφεσις ("release, remission") rather than transliterating the term, describing the concept rather than naming the institution directly as the Hebrew does. The Vulgate expands considerably at this point, adding an explanatory gloss not present in the Hebrew: "id est, quinquagesimus annus remissionis" ("that is, the fiftieth year of remission"), an interpretive clarification of what yoVel means. The LXX also adds "οἷς ἂν γένωνται γυναῖκες" ("to whom they become wives"), making explicit through marriage language what the Hebrew relative clause 'asher tihYeinah lahem ("which will belong to them") leaves more general.