1And the LORD spoke to Moses in the steppes of Moab by the Jordan across from Jericho, saying, 2“Charge the Israelites, that they give to the Levites from their secure holdings towns in which to settle and pastureland for the towns around them you shall give to the Levites. 3And the towns will be theirs to settle, and their pasturelands will be for their cattle and for their goods and for all their beasts. 4And the pasturelands of the towns that you give to the Levites are to be a thousand cubits all around from the wall of the town. 5And you shall measure outside the town the eastern limit two thousand in cubits and the southern limit two thousand in cubits and the western limit two thousand in cubits and the northern limit two thousand in cubits, with the town in the middle. This will be their towns’ pasturelands. 6And the towns that you shall give to the Levites, the six towns of asylum you shall give for a murderer to flee there, and in addition to them you shall give forty-two towns. 7All the towns that you shall give to the Levites will come to forty-eight towns, they and their pasturelands. 8And the towns that you give from the holdings of the Israelites, from the many you shall give much and from the few you shall give less, each according to his estate of which he takes possession shall he give of his towns to the Levites.” 9And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 10“Speak to the Israelites, and you shall say to them, ‘When you cross over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, 11you shall set out for yourselves towns, towns of asylum you shall have, and a murderer may flee there, one who strikes down a person in errance. 12And the towns will be an asylum for you from the avenger, and the murderer will not die until he stands before the community for judgment. 13And the towns that you give, six towns of asylum you shall have. 14Three towns you shall give beyond the Jordan the avenger, and three towns in the land of Canaan, towns of asylum they shall be. 15For the Israelites and for the sojourner and for the settler in their midst these six towns shall be an asylum for everyone who strikes down a person in errance, to flee there. 16But if he struck him with an iron tool and he died, he is a murderer, the murderer is doomed to die. 17And if he struck him with a hand stone by which one may die and he died, he is a murderer, the murderer is doomed to die. 18Or with a wooden hand tool by which one may die he struck him and he died, he is a murderer, the murderer is doomed to die. 19The blood avenger shall put the murderer to death, when he comes upon him he shall put him to death. 20And if in hatred he should knock him down or fling something on him by design and he die, 21or in enmity he strike him with his hand and he die, he who struck is doomed to die, he is a murderer. The blood avenger shall put the murderer to death when he comes upon him. 22But if on an impulse, without enmity, he knocked him down or flung upon him any tool, without design, 23or with any stone by which one may die, without seeing he dropped it on him and he died, he not being his enemy nor seeking his harm, 24the community shall judge between him who struck and the blood avenger on these matters of judgment. 25And the community shall rescue the murderer from the hands of the blood avenger and the community shall take him back to the town of asylum where he fled, and he shall stay there until the death of the high priest who was anointed with the holy oil. 26But if the murderer should indeed go out beyond the border of his town of asylum where he has fled, 27and the blood avenger finds him outside the border of his town of asylum and the blood avenger murders the murderer, he has no bloodguilt. 28But he shall stay in his town of asylum until the death of the high priest, and after the death of the high priest the murderer shall go back to the land of his holding. 29And these shall be for you a statute of judgment for your generations in all your dwelling places. 30Whoever strikes down a person, by witnesses shall the murderer be murdered, and a single witness shall not testify against a person to die. 31And you shall not take ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty to die, for he is doomed to die. 32And you shall not take ransom in lieu of flight to his town of asylum to let him go back to dwell in the land, until the death of the high priest. 33And you shall not pollute the land in which you are, for blood will pollute the land, and for the land there will be no ransoming for the blood that has been shed in it except through the blood of him who shed it. 34And you shall not defile the land in which you dwell, in the midst of which I abide, for I am the LORD, abiding in the midst of the Israelites.’”
CHAPTER 35 NOTES
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2. give to the Levites . . . towns in which to settle. The Levites, it should be recalled, had no tribal territory, and so the other tribes are enjoined to apportion towns for them.
5. the eastern limit. Both the invocation of the four points of the compass and the use of the term “limit” (peʾah) recall the apportionment of the land in the preceding chapter. The juxtaposition—presumably, an editorial maneuver—is significant. The division of the land into tribal territories and clan holdings does not guarantee the creation of a stable, harmonious society. Provision must be made, as it is in these regulations for towns of asylum, for acts of violence of Israelite against Israelite, with protection for the manslayer when the act is not premeditated.
two thousand in cubits. The seeming contradiction with the just stipulated one thousand cubits is most simply resolved by assuming that the two thousand cubits are from perimeter to perimeter, with the breadth of the town itself (“the town in the middle”) excluded from the calculation. Rashi’s solution is that in fact an area extending two thousand cubits beyond the town walls is designated—an inner zone of one thousand cubits for pastureland and an outer zone of another thousand cubits for planted fields and vineyards.
7. forty-eight towns. The total number amounts to four towns per tribe, though the contribution of towns is to be implemented proportionately to the size of the tribe (verse 8).
11. set out. The use of the verbal stem q-r-h here is a little unusual because it generally indicates a chance event. Rashi proposes that the essential meaning of the verb is “to determine,” “to cause to happen” (leshon hazmanah).
murderer. The Hebrew rotseaḥ is used for both an intentional murderer and, as here, for someone who has committed manslaughter.
12. the avenger. The term goʾel is an abbreviated form of goʾel hadam, “blood avenger,” used elsewhere in this chapter. Blood vengeance was a form of vendetta justice executed by the family of the victim. The ritual motive beyond the simple thirst for vengeance was an archaic sense that blood wrongfully shed polluted the land, generated a kind of poisonous miasma, and had to be “redeemed” by shedding the blood of the murderer. (Compare Genesis 9:6: “He who sheds human blood / by humans his blood shall be shed.”) The laws here try to blend this older system of justice implemented by the family with a system in which justice is administered by courts. Thus, the “community” is given the responsibility for adjudicating between the accused person and the blood avenger by determining whether the accused has committed premeditated murder. If he has, capital punishment is then executed by the blood avenger, not the community.
14. Three towns . . . beyond the Jordan. It is odd that the division should be three on each side of the Jordan because nine and a half of the tribes reside to the west of the Jordan. Rashi’s suggestion that there was an unusually high homicide rate among the trans-Jordanian Gileadites seems fanciful. Perhaps three towns of asylum east of the Jordan made sense because this was the region of Israelite settlement farthest removed from the main centers of Israelite population, and thus a fugitive from vendetta justice was likely to feel more safely distanced there from the reach of the avengers.
15. for the sojourner and for the settler. Although “for” is repeated before each noun in the Hebrew, this is merely a variant form of the common hendiadys ger wetoshav, which means “resident alien.”
16. with an iron tool. As Jacob Milgrom reminds us, the historical setting for these laws was the early Iron Age, when iron may have been chiefly used for weapons. The prohibition in Exodus 20:25 against using iron tools in the construction of an altar reflects the same situation. If the fatal blow was delivered with a lethal implement, the presumption is that the killing was intentional.
17. a hand stone. The translation literally reproduces the gnomic expression of the Hebrew. The obvious meaning is a sizable stone that can be grasped in the hand and used as a weapon.
18. Or with a wooden hand tool. There appears to be a progressive extension of the principle of lethal implement through these three instances. The iron tool is designed as a weapon. The stone is an improvised weapon. The wooden hand tool—say, a wooden mallet—is an implement meant for another purpose that has been appropriated as a weapon.
19. when he comes upon him. The verb p-g-ʿ indicates an encounter between two parties (or two material substances), but there may be a pun here because the verb also means “to stab” (the sharp encounter of iron with flesh).
22. But if on an impulse. Or “suddenly,” which is to say, the perpetrator of the act himself did not foresee or plan it.
23. with any stone by which one may die. This stipulation recognizes that the previously mentioned nature of the instrument of killing is not sufficient proof of premeditation: a person could, for example, carelessly throw a “hand stone” out a window, not realizing that someone was standing below.
26. if the murderer should indeed go out beyond the border of his town of asylum. There is a link between the notion of levitical towns of asylum and the extension of protective sanctuary at the altar to manslayers and other accused criminals. Baruch Levine suggests that once the cult was centralized in Jerusalem, the levitical towns assumed the function of asylum previously associated with local sanctuaries. In Mesopotamia there were analogous towns of asylum, and Moshe Weinfeld notes that the Egyptians had zones of asylum, supervised by priests, which may shed light on the linking of the duration of asylum here with the life span of the high priest.
30. by witnesses. For capital crimes, at least two witnesses were necessary to convict the accused.
shall the murderer be murdered. The verb ratsaḥ reaches its longest semantic stretch here when it is used in the sense of “execute”—probably in order to underline the notion of measure-for-measure justice. In verse 25 it is used to designate an involuntary manslayer.
32. ransom in lieu of flight. The Hebrew says literally, “ransom to flee.” Ransom thus is equally prohibited as a substitute for the capital punishment of a murderer and as a substitute for a manslayer’s settling in a town of asylum, which would be a form of exile within the borders of the country (as in the sentence of internal exile to a remote region in the Czarist system of justice).