Numbers 36:6

Summary

This verse opens Moses' formal ruling on the daughters of Zelophehad: they are permitted to marry whomever they consider good, but only within the clan of their father's tribe. The sentence is framed as a direct citation of a command from Yehovah ("Yehovah", H3068G).

Key words

• tzivvah ("he has commanded", H6680) — piel perfect, marking a completed, authoritative act of command by YHWH.
• tov ("good", H2896A) — adjective governed by the preposition la ("to the"), forming the idiom "to what is good," i.e., whatever the women judge fitting.
• 'einei ("view/eyes", H5869I) — dual construct noun, literally "eyes of," used with a possessive suffix to mean "in their own judgment."
• tihyeyna ("they will belong/become", H1961) — qal imperfect, third-person feminine plural, repeated twice in the verse to frame both the permission and the restriction as ongoing legal states.
• mishpachat ("clan of", H4940) and mateh ("tribe of", H4294H) — both construct nouns, stacking two levels of kinship (clan within tribe) to specify the permitted scope of marriage.

What the text says

The verse begins with the formula zeh ha-davar 'asher tzivvah Yehovah ("this is the word/thing that Yehovah has commanded"), the standard introduction for a legal pronouncement, directed li-vnot Tzelophchad ("to/concerning the daughters of Zelophehad", H1323G construct + proper name H6765). The command itself splits into two parallel clauses, each ending in the same verb form tihyeyna le-nashim ("they will belong/become to men as wives"). The first clause grants freedom: la-tov be-'eynei-hem ("to whatever is good in their own eyes") — an idiom expressing personal discretion, not an external judge's approval. The second clause, introduced by the adverb 'akh ("only", H0389), restricts that freedom: marriage must occur le-mishpachat mateh avihem ("to the clan of the tribe of their father"), using two stacked construct nouns to specify a narrower kinship unit than the tribe alone. The repetition of the verb tihyeyna in both halves creates a grammatical parallelism that sets a general permission against a specific limitation, without needing a contrastive conjunction beyond 'akh.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders la-tov be-'eynei-hem as hou areskei enantion autōn ("to whomever pleases before them"), preserving the sense of personal discretion but shifting the idiom from "eyes" to "pleasing." The Vulgate compresses the entire double-clause Hebrew structure into a single concise sentence, "nubant quibus volunt, tantum ut suae tribus hominibus" ("let them marry whom they wish, provided to men of their own tribe"), omitting the repeated verb tihyeyna and the explicit mention of mishpachat ("clan") found in the Hebrew and LXX (dēmou).