your elders and judges must go out and measure how far it is to the cities in the vicinity of the corpse.

I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword will devour flesh – the blood of the slaughtered and captured, the chief of the enemy’s leaders!’”

If a homicide victim should be found lying in a field in the land the Lord your God is giving you, and no one knows who killed him,

and all the elders of that city nearest the corpse must wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley.

Then the elders of the city nearest to the corpse must take from the herd a heifer that has not been worked – that has never pulled with the yoke –