Numbers30chapter 30

Numbers 30:1-2

The law on vows is spoken to the heads of the tribes rather than to the whole congregation, and those men would be the ones judging such cases when they came up. Verse 2 gives the rule for a man in a single line with no qualification on it, and the verb rendered break is the word used elsewhere of profaning what is holy. Deuteronomy 23:21-23 and Ecclesiastes 5:4-5 press the same point, and Matthew 5:33 states it as shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths. The chapter also keeps two things apart, a vow that promises something to God and an oath that binds the soul to go without.

Numbers 30:3-8

One procedure is written out twice, once for a daughter in her father's house and once for a wife, and both turn on the phrase in the day that he heareth. The power to disallow lasts that day and then closes, so a vow left unchallenged past it stands. Where the father or the husband does disallow it, the text says the Lord shall forgive her, which treats the vow as a real debt remitted rather than as words that never counted. Barnes reads the at all of verse 6 as covering a girl betrothed but not yet married, and Gill allows either the betrothed or the married woman.

Numbers 30:9-12

A widow and a divorced woman stand by their own word, and the rule is given flat with no reason attached to it. The daughter and the wife each have a head who may hear a vow and disallow it, and these two women have none, which is the difference the chapter names and does not explain. Verses 10 to 12 go back to the wife who vowed under her husband's roof and repeat the same limit, that his voiding of it falls on the day he heard it or not at all.

Numbers 30:13-16

To afflict the soul is the phrase Leviticus 16:29 and 23:27 use of the day of atonement, so the vows in view here include fasting and self denial. Verse 14 makes silence an act, since a husband who says nothing from day to day confirms what his wife bound herself to, and 1 Samuel 1:21-23 shows Elkanah doing that with Hannah's vow. Verse 15 puts the price of a late annulment on the man in four words, he shall bear her iniquity, so the guilt of the unkept vow moves to him. The closing verse holds the whole statute to two relationships, a man and his wife and a father and his daughter in her youth, and Numbers 6:2 had already opened the Nazarite vow to a woman.