Deuteronomy 19:6-12

19:6 Otherwise the blood avenger will chase after the killer in the heat of his anger, eventually overtake him, ¹  and kill him, ²  though this is not a capital case ³  since he did not hate him at the time of the accident. 19:7 Therefore, I am commanding you to set apart for yourselves three cities. 19:8 If the Lord your God enlarges your borders as he promised your ancestors ⁴  and gives you all the land he pledged to them, ⁵  19:9 and then you are careful to observe all these commandments ⁶  I am giving ⁷  you today (namely, to love the Lord your God and to always walk in his ways), then you must add three more cities ⁸  to these three. 19:10 You must not shed innocent blood ⁹  in your land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, for that would make you guilty. ¹⁰  19:11 However, suppose a person hates someone else ¹¹  and stalks him, attacks him, kills him, ¹²  and then flees to one of these cities. 19:12 The elders of his own city must send for him and remove him from there to deliver him over to the blood avenger ¹³  to die.

¹ tn Heb “and overtake him, for the road is long.”

² tn Heb “smite with respect to life,” that is, fatally.

³ tn Heb “no judgment of death.”

⁴ tn Heb “fathers.”

⁵ tn Heb “he said to give to your ancestors.” The pronoun has been used in the translation instead for stylistic reasons.

⁶ tn Heb “all this commandment.” This refers here to the entire covenant agreement of the Book of Deuteronomy as encapsulated in the Shema (Deut 6:4-5).

⁷ tn Heb “commanding”; NAB “which I enjoin on you today.”

⁸ sn You will add three more cities. Since these are alluded to nowhere else and thus were probably never added, this must be a provision for other cities of refuge should they be needed (cf. v. 8). See P. C. Craigie, Deuteronomy (NICOT), 267.

⁹ tn Heb “innocent blood must not be shed.” The Hebrew phrase דָּם נָקִי (dam naqiy) means the blood of a person to whom no culpability or responsibility adheres because what he did was without malice aforethought (HALOT 224 s.v דָּם 4.b).

¹⁰ tn Heb “and blood will be upon you” (cf. KJV, ASV); NRSV “thereby bringing bloodguilt upon you.”

¹¹ tn Heb “his neighbor.”

¹² tn Heb “rises against him and strikes him fatally.”

¹³ tn The גֹאֵל הַדָּם (go’el haddam, “avenger of blood”) would ordinarily be a member of the victim’s family who, after due process of law, was invited to initiate the process of execution (cf. Num 35:16-28). See R. Hubbard, NIDOTTE 1:789-94.