Reading: Numbers 35-36, Psalm 52
Hey, we are wrapping up the book of Numbers! No more grumbles, right? Well, we’ll see. Not on the level of Numbers anyway. Tomorrow we will begin the last book of Moses, Deuteronomy. Almost the entire book is a long speech that Moses makes right on the edge of the promised land, as a final pep talk before he leaves the people to cross the Jordan and conquer the land. But we aren’t quite there yet. First, there are a couple of things God wants Israel to know.
The first is about the Levites. One of the major points of the law given so far is to make sure the Levites are not deprived of their livelihood, since they will not receive land the way the rest of the tribes do. So they know they will be fed. But where will they live? God tells the people that within the land they take over they are to set aside cities specifically for the Levites to live in, with the pastureland around it. But wait a minute, isn’t this giving the Levites land after all?
Well, not exactly. While these particular cities are Levite run, they are still in the jurisdiction of other tribes. The tribe of Levi as an entity still does not rule any territory the way the other tribes do. Also, these are not the only places the tribe of Levi is to live. As we will see, part of the duty of the Levites is to teach the people, and to that end they will live throughout Israel in towns and villages. These cities aren’t their inheritance, they have another purpose.
That purpose is made clear along with the second topic God covers here: justice and vengeance. This may be tough for us to get our heads around, given our highly systematic and well defined legal structure. For us, if a murder occurs, we hold a trial, present evidence, a jury hands down a verdict, and the state executes justice. But in those times, justice was a far more personal matter. There was little in the way of “state” at all, and it certainly wasn’t going around holding trials. Matters of justice were handled on a local level by the various elders of the towns. When something like a murder occurred, if the elders were convinced, they would nominate an “avenger” to carry out justice. Generally this was a family member or relative of the victim, and they became duty-bound to exact vengeance.
I can see, and I hope you can too, that this system has some potentially big problems. In a society mostly made of small towns, outsiders or those out of favor could easily fall under false accusation, and unjust vengeance be carried out. Additionally, what about unintentional deaths, as might happen quite a bit in a pre-industrial farming society. Well, God has a safeguard to at least reduce the problem.
Those Levite cities are the safeguard. Six of the Levite cities are named “cities of refuge.” When one of the above scenarios occurred, the alleged perpetrator could flee to one of them. But not just anyone could come in. The elders of the city of refuge would hear their case and do their own investigation. They were the appeals court of Israel. They allowed the unjustly accused recourse, though the cost was high. They could not leave the city even if the elders decided they were not guilty, or the avenger could take them out legally. It is worth noting that this was the case even if the one fleeing was innocent of murder. God goes out of his way to make sure the people understand this- people who cause death, even unintentionally, have to be separated from the people. Death is a result of the human problem, and the people of Israel are to be as separate from it as possible.
Other things of note about the cities of refuge and justice. There are no ransoms that can be paid to “get off” for murder, or even manslaughter. The cities of refuge are the only means of escaping the avenger. God makes it clear that the cities of refuge do not reduce the penalty for killing another human. His command from Genesis 9 is never reduced. Second, the enforced exile into the city for people who have killed another human has a time limit. This is easy to slide by but it is actually extremely significant. They must remain in the city of refuge until the death of the high priest. The high priest, the bearer of the guilt of the people. That guy. When he dies, the accused can go home. The one who bore his guilt has died. The guilt is carried away, and he can return to his life in the promised land. His exile ends. This may seem like just a convenient marker of time, but it is much more than that.
These themes- exile, blood guilt, and the end of exile- will grow in importance over the course of the story. This passage about cities of refuge, easy to scan through and move away from, actually carries an extremely important element in the whole story. This is not an accident, and is worth paying attention to.
The rest of today’s passage talks about the inheritance of women in houses that had no male heirs. Note that this is above and beyond the commands already given on this subject, about the year of Jubilee and these family lands returning to their family of origin. This is about the generational maintenance of this land within the tribe. The daughters of Zelophohad, the same ladies who asked about the Jubilee and the inheritance of their father, now are brought up again. The concern here is that by marrying into another tribe, their land will become part of that tribe. Moses responds by limiting the marriage of women who inherit property to within their own tribe to protect that inheritance. To us, this may seem like needless meticulous restriction, but to the people at the time it was supremely important. These corner cases about inheritance were about to be extremely relevant, as the people were right on the edge of entering the promised land. Moses is dealing with a last bit of case law before giving his final speech to the people of Israel and sending them on to the next great stage of our story.