1. the LORD your God . . . the LORD your God. It is a stylistic peculiarity of Deuteronomy that the LORD, YHWH, very rarely occurs without “your God,” and even the substitution of a pronoun, as here, is generally avoided. This linguistic oddity reflects the didactic emphasis of the book, tirelessly reminding Israel that YHWH is its God.

2. three towns you shall set aside. This provision of towns of asylum for involuntary man-slayers parallels the law in Numbers 35. For a discussion of the concept, its connections with vendetta justice, and its ancient Near Eastern precedents, see the commentary on that chapter. As is often the case, Deuteronomy shifts some of the grounds of the older law, and the comments that follow will be limited to observing those changes as well as to elucidating verbal formulations distinctive to this passage.

3. You shall gauge for yourself the distance. The verb takhin, which commonly means “to make ready” and, in dynastic contexts, “to found firmly,” also has the occasional sense of “measure” or “gauge,” clearly the relevant sense here. “Distance” is literally “way,” an extended sense of that primary term current in many languages. It is important to survey the land in order to space the three towns equally from the centers of population. Too great a distance to the town of asylum could prove fatal to the fugitive (see verse 6).

5. and the iron springs from the wood. As Rashi observes, it is ambiguous as to whether “the wood” refers to the tree being chopped down, from which the axe inadvertently, and lethally, rebounds, or to the haft of the axe, from which the axehead breaks loose. The former possibility seems a bit more likely because otherwise the writer would be using “the wood” in quick sequence in two different senses, and the slipping of the hand on the axe suggests that the person has lost his grip, not that the axe has come apart.

6. Lest the blood avenger pursue the murderer . . . and strike him down mortally. In Numbers 35, if the fugitive is careless enough to be caught in flight by the blood avenger, he is considered fair game. Here, the act of vengeance outside the asylum precincts seems to be viewed as a crime, and all possible steps should be taken to prevent it. One may surmise that the text in Numbers is a half-step closer to the archaic institution of vendetta justice and concedes it just a little more legitimacy. Here, as throughout the passage, the inadvertent killer is referred to as the rotseaḥ, the murderer. There is no specialized biblical term for “manslayer,” but the use here of rotseaḥ may be meant to convey the gravity of having taken a human life, even unintentionally.

9. to love the LORD your God and to go in His ways. The constant reiteration of such formulaic phrases is still another manifestation of the didactic character of this book.

you shall add for yourself another three towns to these three. In Numbers, it is stipulated from the outset that there are to be three towns of asylum in trans-Jordan and three west of the Jordan. Harmonistic interpreters infer that the three trans-Jordanian sites are implied though not stated in verse 2, so that now we come to a grand total of nine. It is more plausible to conclude that the present law envisages only three towns of asylum, projecting the possibility of an additional three to some fortunate future moment when the Israelite territory will be sufficiently expanded to justify another three.

10. And the blood of the innocent will not be shed in the midst of your land. The innocent blood would be the blood of the manslayer, who, because he has killed unintentionally, does not deserve to die. In the parallel law in Numbers, the stress is on the idea that innocent blood shed pollutes the land, a sacral and archaic idea. Here, by contrast, the emphasis is social; innocent blood is not to be shed in “the midst of your land,” evil must be expunged “from Israel” (verse 13).

11. that man. The Hebrew merely says “he,” but English does not tolerate that degree of ambiguity in pronominal reference.

12. give him into the hand of the blood avenger. The prerogative of vendetta justice is recognized insofar as the blood avenger is allowed to execute the death sentence, but the implication is that the elders have first made a legal determination through a trial.

13. root out the blood of the innocent. This is an ellipsis for rooting out the one who has shed innocent blood.

it will go well with you. This Deuteronomic pragmatic note is absent from Numbers 35.

14. landmark. The Hebrew gevul means “border” and, by two different kinds of metonymy, the territory marked out by the border and the stone pile that marks the border.

the first ones. The early generations that established the division of the land.

15. by the word. Literally, “by the mouth.”

17. before the LORD, before the priests and judges. This apposition is not entirely transparent. The normative sense of “before the LORD” in Deuteronomy is at the central sanctuary, but it is doubtful that only a single court in the entire country is envisaged. Rashi’s proposal may capture the intended sense: “it should seem to them as though they were standing before God” when the litigants submit themselves to legal authority.

21. a life for a life, an eye for an eye . . . a foot for a foot. For a discussion of the biblical lex talionis, see the comment on Exodus 21:23–25. There, however, the reference is to someone who does bodily or mortal injury to another person. Here, the reference is to the intention of doing grave injury by bearing false witness. David Cohen-Zemach nicely observes that in our text first we have an abstract juridical formulation (“You shall do to him as he plotted to do to his brother.”) and then a more popular, probably proverbial statement of the idea (“a life for a life,” etc.). Exodus 21 uses a different preposition, taḥat (literally, “instead of”), whereas the present version employs bE, which in all likelihood expresses the function it sometimes has of “for the price of.” The two formulations might be semantically identical, but it is also possible that the version in Exodus assumes an archaic idea of a life taken or an injury inflicted literally “replacing” or balancing out (taḥat, “instead”) a life lost or an injury suffered, whereas here the talionis may be viewed in quasmonetary terms as payback.