The angel said to Manoah’s wife that the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb,
which implies that he would be a lifelong Nazirite. This appears to many to be unusual, given the legislation regarding the Nazirite vow in Numbers 6:1–21. That chapter, to be sure, does not offer a comprehensive review of the legislation pertaining to the Nazirite vow. It does not explain why people would take the vow or how they would enter it, nor does it relate the institution of the temporary Nazirate. It simply regulates what has already been in existence for some unknown period of time. Yet, its concern includes the character of the vow (the votary separates himself to the Lord), the recourse when the vow is inadvertently broken, and the way to terminate the vow.1 And so it lends credence to the notion that a Nazirite vow was normally temporary.
That said, there is much difficulty in working out a general profile of the Nazirite in the Hebrew Bible. For there exists little attestation to Nazirites outside the Torah, and what is available portrays their behaviour as different from the legislation in Numbers 6. None of the references is to a temporary Nazirite, described in Numbers, but to a permanent votary. Samson is the only person actually labelled a Nazirite, and was dedicated to God while still in his mother’s womb and thus a lifelong Nazirite. The prophet Samuel has also been regarded as a Nazirite, and a lifelong one at that, with his mother Hannah vowing to God that if he gave her a son, she would dedicate him to God his whole life, with no razor to be used on his head (1 Samuel 1:11).
Yet it could still be that these cases are exceptional, when we keep in mind the above-stated concern of Numbers 6. So it is more than just a possibility that the texts describing the lifelong Nazarite of Samson and the possible case of Samuel are actually exceptional cases of a custom normally followed along the lines of the Numbers 6 regulations. All told, it is shaky methodology to assume on the basis of one, possibly two, cases in the whole breadth of the recorded history of Israel that the early period of its history only knew of lifelong Nazirites. Furthermore, Second Temple literature suggests that a lifelong Nazirite was an exception, not the norm (1 Macc. 3:49; Josephus, Ant. 19.6.1; m. Naz 1:3–7; 3:1–7).2
5 for behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor shall come upon his head, for the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb, and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines.”