Deuteronomy 19:7-21

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 ¹  and gives you all the land he pledged to them, ²  19:9 and then you are careful to observe all these commandments ³  I am giving ⁴  you today (namely, to love the Lord your God and to always walk in his ways), then you must add three more cities ⁵  to these three. 19:10 You must not shed innocent blood ⁶  in your land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, for that would make you guilty. ⁷  19:11 However, suppose a person hates someone else ⁸  and stalks him, attacks him, kills him, ⁹  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 ¹⁰  to die. 19:13 You must not pity him, but purge out the blood of the innocent ¹¹  from Israel, so that it may go well with you.

Laws Concerning Witnesses

19:14 You must not encroach on your neighbor’s property, ¹²  which will have been defined ¹³  in the inheritance you will obtain in the land the Lord your God is giving you. ¹⁴ 

19:15 A single witness may not testify ¹⁵  against another person for any trespass or sin that he commits. A matter may be legally established ¹⁶  only on the testimony of two or three witnesses. 19:16 If a false ¹⁷  witness testifies against another person and accuses him of a crime, ¹⁸  19:17 then both parties to the controversy must stand before the Lord, that is, before the priests and judges ¹⁹  who will be in office in those days. 19:18 The judges will thoroughly investigate the matter, and if the witness should prove to be false and to have given false testimony against the accused, ²⁰  19:19 you must do to him what he had intended to do to the accused. In this way you will purge ²¹  evil from among you. 19:20 The rest of the people will hear and become afraid to keep doing such evil among you. 19:21 You must not show pity; the principle will be a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, and a foot for a foot. ²² 

[19:8]  ¹ tn Heb “fathers.”

[19:8]  ² tn Heb “he said to give to your ancestors.” The pronoun has been used in the translation instead for stylistic reasons.

[19:9]  ³ 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).

[19:9]  ⁴ tn Heb “commanding”; NAB “which I enjoin on you today.”

[19:9]  ⁵ 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.

[19:10]  ⁶ 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).

[19:10]  ⁷ tn Heb “and blood will be upon you” (cf. KJV, ASV); NRSV “thereby bringing bloodguilt upon you.”

[19:11]  ⁸ tn Heb “his neighbor.”

[19:11]  ⁹ tn Heb “rises against him and strikes him fatally.”

[19:12]  ¹⁰ 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.

[19:13]  ¹¹ sn Purge out the blood of the innocent. Because of the corporate nature of Israel’s community life, the whole community shared in the guilt of unavenged murder unless and until vengeance occurred. Only this would restore spiritual and moral equilibrium (Num 35:33).

[19:14]  ¹² tn Heb “border.” Cf. NRSV “You must not move your neighbor’s boundary marker.”

[19:14]  ¹³ tn Heb “which they set off from the beginning.”

[19:14]  ¹⁴ tn The Hebrew text includes “to possess it.” This phrase has been left untranslated to avoid redundancy.

[19:15]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “rise up” (likewise in v. 16).

[19:15]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “may stand.”

[19:16]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “violent” (חָמָס, khamas). This is a witness whose motivation from the beginning is to do harm to the accused and who, therefore, resorts to calumny and deceit. See I. Swart and C. VanDam, NIDOTTE 2:177-80.

[19:16]  ¹⁸ tn Or “rebellion.” Rebellion against God’s law is in view (cf. NAB “of a defection from the law”).

[19:17]  ¹⁹ tn The appositional construction (“before the Lord, that is, before the priests and judges”) indicates that these human agents represented the Lord himself, that is, they stood in his place (cf. Deut 16:18-20; 17:8-9).

[19:18]  ²⁰ tn Heb “his brother” (also in the following verse).

[19:19]  ²¹ tn Heb “you will burn out” (בִּעַרְתָּ, bi’arta). Like a cancer, unavenged sin would infect the whole community. It must, therefore, be excised by the purging out of its perpetrators who, presumably, remained unrepentant (cf. Deut 13:6; 17:7, 12; 21:21; 22:21-22, 24; 24:7).

[19:21]  ²² sn This kind of justice is commonly called lex talionis or “measure for measure” (cf. Exod 21:23-25; Lev 24:19-20). It is likely that it is the principle that is important and not always a strict application. That is, the punishment should fit the crime and it may do so by the payment of fines or other suitable and equitable compensation (cf. Exod 22:21; Num 35:31). See T. S. Frymer-Kensky, “Tit for Tat: The Principle of Equal Retribution in Near Eastern and Biblical Law,” BA 43 (1980): 230-34.