Today we begin Joshua Chapter 20.
For the Complete Jewish Bible, click HERE.
For the King James Version, click HERE.
“Adonai said to Y’hoshua, ‘Tell the people of Isra’el, ‘Select the cities of refuge about which I spoke to you through Moshe; so that anyone who kills someone by mistake and unknowingly may escape there; they will serve as refuges for you from the next-of-kin avenger.”-Joshua 20:1
The opening verses of Joshua Chapter 20 are pretty much a duplicate of what was laid down in chapter 35 of the Book of Numbers.
At this point in time in the Scriptures, the land has been…I don’t want to use the word “conquered”…but let’s just say it has been overpowered to the point where the assignment of territories and cities has begun in earnest.
The gist of Joshua Chapter 20 is all about God instructing Joshua to establish a broad network of exactly 48 Levitical cities.
And let me make it clear these cities were primarily for the Levites and no one else.
Having said that, I’m sure Israelites from some of the other tribes and even some foreigners may have lived in these cities as special exceptions, but for the most part, they were NOT to be mixed populations.
Out of these 48 cities, 6 of them were to be “Cities of Refuge” or “Sanctuary Cities”.
3 of these sanctuary cities were to be on the west side of the Jordan River and the other 3 were to be on the east side of the Jordan (NOT Promised Land territory).
I should also mention there wasn’t a cap on the number of Sanctuary Cities Israel could establish.
As Israel succeeded in driving out more of the native inhabitants and conquering more and more of their land inheritance, it was okay for them create more Cities of Refuge on a per-need-basis.
For obvious reasons, these 6 sanctuary cities were located at strategic points spread out from each other, again not just inside the land but outside the land (the Transjordan) as well.
The objective was to give a fleeing accidental murderer at least half a chance to escape to a safe place because if he was captured by close relatives of the person he killed before he could get his butt inside of a City of Refuge, he was toast.
The modern legal term for the Biblical version of “unintentional killing” is “involuntary manslaughter”.
Now many passages in the Scripture possess many levels of interpretation embedded in them and these particular verses are no exception.
Unfortunately, a good majority of Bible scholars will read these verses and only interpret them at a very surface level.
They’ll say the establishment of these Cities of Refuge was just the way ancient civilizations handled “involuntary manslaughter” before central governments and armed police forces were a thing.
They’re not necessarily wrong but if one digs deeper, you’ll find that these cities also symbolize or point to a strange place the Scripture refers to as “Abraham’s Bosom”.
We’ll talk about this some more the next time we meet.
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