Cities of refuge
19
📚When the LORD your God has cut off the nations, whose land the LORD your God gives you, and you take their place and live in their cities and in their houses, 2 📚you must set apart three cities for you in the middle of your land which the LORD your God gives you to possess. 3 📚You must prepare the roads for yourselves, and divide into three parts the territory of your land which the LORD your God gives you to inherit, so that everyone who has killed another person may flee there. 4 📚And this is the case of the one who has killed another who flees there so that he can live: whoever unintentionally kills his neighbour whom he did not hate previously, 5 📚as when a man goes into the forest with his neighbour to cut wood, and his hand makes a swing with the axe to cut down the tree, and the head of the axe slips off the handle and strikes his neighbour and kills him, he shall flee to one of those cities, and live. 6 📚Otherwise the avenger of blood, in the heat of his anger, will pursue the one who has killed that person, and overtake him because the way is long, and kill him. But he is not deserving of death because he did not hate his neighbour previously. 7 Therefore I command you, saying, “You must set apart three cities for yourselves”.
8 📚And if the LORD your God enlarges your territory, as he has sworn to your fathers, and gives you all the land which he promised to give to your fathers, 9 📚if you keep and do all these commandments which I command you this day, to love the LORD your God and to walk in his ways always, then you must add three more cities for yourselves, besides these three. 10 📚This is so that innocent blood will not be shed in your land, which the LORD your God gives you as an inheritance; otherwise guilt concerning blood will be on you.
11 📚But if anyone hates his neighbour, and lies in wait for him, and rises up against him and strikes him so that he dies, and flees into one of these cities, 12 📚then the elders of his city must send men and bring him from there, and deliver him into the hands of the avenger of blood, so that he may die. 13 📚Your eye must not pity him, but you must put away the guilt of innocent blood from Israel, so that it may go well with you.
14 📚You must not move your neighbour’s landmark which the ancestors set in your inheritance, which you inherit in the land that the LORD your God gives you to possess.
15 📚A single witness must not rise up against a man for any crime, or for any sin which he may have committed; the matter must be established by the testimony of two witnesses, or by the testimony of three witnesses.
16 📚If a false witness rises up against any man to testify against him about some wrongdoing, 17 📚then both the men who have the disagreement must stand before the LORD, before the priests and the judges who will be there in those days; 18 📚and the judges must make a careful investigation; and, then, if the witness is a false witness, and has testified falsely against his brother, 19 📚then you must do to him just as he had intended to do to his brother. In this way you must purge evil from among you. 20 📚And the rest will hear, and fear, and from then on not commit any such evil among you.
Essence of the law
21 📚And your eye must not pity; but life must go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.