Numbers 6:8

Summary

The verse states that throughout the duration of the Nazirite's vow, he is holy to Yehovah. The Hebrew constructs a chain of possession ("all the days of his consecration") followed by a nominal clause declaring his status ("holy is he").

Key words

• kol ("all", H3605) — construct form beginning a genitive chain; it governs the following noun and means "all of" or "the entirety of."
• yemei ("days of", H3117G) — plural construct form of "day"; being construct, it cannot stand alone and requires the next word to complete its meaning ("days of X").
• nizro ("his Nazirite-vow", H5145G) — construct noun with a third-person masculine singular pronominal suffix ("his"), naming the specific vow/separation to which the "days" belong.
• qadosh ("holy", H6918G) — masculine singular adjective, functioning as the predicate of a verbless clause.
• hu ("he", H1931) — independent personal pronoun serving as the subject of the nominal sentence, paired with qadosh.

What the text says

The verse opens with a construct chain: kol ("all") governs yemei ("days of"), which in turn governs nizro ("his Nazirite-vow"). This produces the sense "all the days of his vow of separation," marking a temporal scope rather than a single event. The construct chain itself contains no verb; it simply identifies a period.

The second half of the verse, qadosh hu la-YHWH, is a nominal (verbless) clause. In Biblical Hebrew, such clauses assert a present state without needing a form of "to be." The adjective qadosh ("holy") is placed before the pronoun hu ("he"), which is standard word order for predicate-adjective sentences of this type. The prepositional phrase la-YHWH ("to/for Yehovah") specifies the relational direction of that holiness — the person's set-apart status is oriented toward Yehovah, using the preposition la (H9005) attached to the divine name YHWH (H3068G).

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text uses a verbless clause (qadosh hu, "holy [is] he"), asserting a present condition. Both the LXX (ἔσται, "he will be") and the Vulgate (erit, "will be") insert an explicit future-tense verb where the Hebrew has none. The Spanish RV1909 and SBLIBRE follow the Hebrew's present-tense sense more closely ("será santo" / "él es santo"), though RV1909 also introduces a future verb form ("será") absent from the Hebrew construction. The BSB English rendering ("he is holy") matches the Hebrew's stative, verbless structure most directly.