Numbers 6:7

6:7 He must not defile himself even for his father or his mother or his brother or his sister if they die, because the separation for his God is on his head.

Numbers 36:2

36:2 They said, “The Lord commanded my lord to give the land as an inheritance by lot to the Israelites; and my lord was commanded by the Lord to give the inheritance of our brother Zelophehad to his daughters.

tn The vav (ו) conjunction at the beginning of the clause specifies the cases of corpses that are to be avoided, no matter how painful it might be.

tn The construction uses the infinitive construct with the preposition and the suffixed subjective genitive – “in the dying of them” – to form the adverbial clause of time.

sn The Nazirite would defile himself, i.e., ruin his vow, by contacting their corpses. Jesus’ hard saying in Matt 8:22, “let the dead bury their own dead,” makes sense in the light of this passage – Jesus was calling for commitment to himself.

tn The word “separation” here is metonymy of adjunct – what is on his head is long hair that goes with the vow.

tn The genitive could perhaps be interpreted as possession, i.e., “the vow of his God,” but it seems more likely that an objective genitive would be more to the point.

tn The infinitive construct “to give” serves here as the complement or object of the verb, answering what the Lord had commanded Moses.