Numbers 36:8

Summary

The verse states a rule for any daughter who holds a tribal inheritance in Israel: she must marry within a clan of her own father's tribe. The stated purpose is that each Israelite may retain the inheritance of his ancestors.

Key words

• yo.Re.shet ("[who] possesses", H3423G) — a qal feminine singular participle, describing the daughter as one who currently holds an inheritance, not merely one who might receive one.
• na.cha.Lah ("an inheritance", H5159) — feminine singular noun, the possessed landed property that motivates the marriage restriction.
• mi.mish.Pa.chat ma.Teh 'a.Vi.ha — a construct chain: "from the clan of the tribe of her father", stacking three nouns in construct to narrow the marriage pool precisely to her paternal clan.
• tih.Yeh le.'i.Shah ("she will belong... to a wife", H1961 + H0802H) — qal imperfect verb "to be" plus preposition "to" plus "wife", an idiomatic construction meaning "she shall become a wife," expressing a binding future obligation rather than mere possibility.
• yi.re.Shu ("they may possess", H3423G) — qal jussive plural, expressing purpose/result ("so that they may possess"), sharing the same root as yo.Re.shet, linking the daughter's possessing (v.8a) to the sons' possessing (v.8b) through repetition of the root.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with ve.khol bat ("and every daughter", H9002+H3605+H1323G), immediately qualified by the participle yo.Re.shet — this is not any daughter, but specifically one who possesses an inheritance. The phrase mi.ma.tOt be.Nei Yis.ra.'El ("from the tribes of the sons of Israel") specifies the source of that inheritance as tribal land. The main clause is built on the chain le.'e.Chad mi.mish.Pa.chat ma.Teh 'a.Vi.ha — "to one from the clan of the tribe of her father" — a triple construct narrowing the eligible marriage partner to someone within her own paternal tribal clan specifically. The verb tih.Yeh ("she will belong/be") with le.'i.Shah ("to a wife") forms the standard Hebrew idiom for "become a wife to," here in the imperfect, carrying a sense of obligation or regulation rather than simple futurity.

The purpose clause introduced by le.Ma.'an ("so that") uses the jussive yi.re.Shu ("they may possess") from the same root (H3423G) as yo.Re.shet in the opening clause — the text creates a wordplay linking the daughter's act of "possessing" an inheritance to the sons of Israel "possessing" their ancestral portions. The closing phrase ish na.cha.Lat 'a.vo.Ta[v] ("each man the inheritance of his fathers") uses 'ish ("everyone/each man", H0376I) distributively, applying the principle individually across Israel.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders yo.Re.shet na.cha.Lah as ἀγχιστεύουσα κληρονομίαν ("inheriting by right of next-kinship an inheritance"), introducing a specific legal-kinship term (ἀγχιστεύω) not explicit in the Hebrew participle yo.Re.shet ("possessing"), which itself carries no kinship-right nuance beyond simple possession. The Vulgate condenses the verse considerably, rendering it as cunctae feminae... maritos accipient ("all the women... shall take husbands"), omitting the specific construct chain narrowing the choice to "the clan of the tribe of her father" and instead generalizing to "the same tribe" (de eadem tribu), a broader restriction than the Hebrew's clan-level specificity.