NOTES for Num 35:1-34
When setting the boundaries of the land He appointed for His people, God specifically points out the need to designate special so-called cities of refuge within it. These are places where someone who had committed an unintentional or simply accidental killing could escape vengeance by the victim’s relatives. According to the norms of customary law, whose roots went back to the common Semitic era, all bloodshed demanded vengeance, regardless of whether it was accidental, unintentional, or deliberate.
This was plainly a magical approach, connected with the idea that shed blood was defiling in itself and that the defilement had to be cleansed. It was believed that the defilement affected all the murdered person’s relatives if they did not avenge themselves upon the killer, because refusing vengeance meant a kind of indirect complicity in the killing. A blood avenger who could take revenge but did not use the opportunity became, as it were, an accomplice to the killing, albeit not directly but indirectly.
Consequently, if it was possible to find and kill the killer, every blood avenger—and in a patriarchal clan society every member of the murdered person’s clan was one—had to do so. Yet in God’s eyes there was, of course, a difference between deliberate murder, when someone intended to kill from the outset and did so, and killing through carelessness or simply without intent—for example, in the heat of the moment or in a fight in which the person had not intended to kill anyone but, as sometimes happens, misjudged the force of the blow.
The cities of refuge were created for precisely such involuntary killers, who under the laws of the Torah did not deserve the death penalty. It was important not only to save those who were not deliberate murderers from blood vengeance, but also to show everyone that there should be no place for anything magical in relations between people, even when it concerns the magic of shed blood. Such magical thinking not only divides people from one another but also separates them from God.