Canter Bridge

The Pentateuch’s development of a world where murdered Abel’s blood cries out from the soil into which it has poured imposes a severe legal mercy upon its organized inhabitants.

What is one to do when blood pollutes the earth beyond redemption unless it is taken seriously enough to be avenged? How will a community keep vengeance from becoming an absolute virtue in the light of the blessing it allegedly maintains?

The Levites, liturgical odd men out that they are, will play a part in the legislative balance that Israel achieves in its constituent documents. We read in Numbers 5 that they will serve as the custodians of a half dozen cities of refuge, enough for each pair of tribes to have claim on one. Proximity, when one is fleeing for one’s life, is not empty promise.

Torah finds the required balance by tracing out what in our time we regard as the distinction between murder and manslaughter. Eyes wide open to the difficulty of discerning intention, the book of Numbers imposes the heavy burden of presupposed guilt upon the man responsible for another’s loss of life. If accused, he must flee, regardless of any protestations of benign intent. Blood has flowed, a penalty must be enacted. If this penalty does not consist of the death of the slayer—whether he has acted with or without malice—it must at least exact a lengthy confinement in a distant city as an alien with few rights but to continue breathing.

Yet the avenger, too, is curtailed. He enters such a city of refuge to do his noble kinly killing only at the cost of becoming a pursued man himself. If justice in a world where brother murders brother cannot always be served its full plate, it will at least stop the bleeding before it becomes unrestrained inter-clan warfare. Rarely will anyone emerge from such a legislative body of restraint feeling fully satisfied. Grievance will more often than not be offered an environment in which its worst extremity will fade away over a decade’s time.

There is in this legal framework only the slightest residue of divine decree. Instead, a community’s wisdom is asked to make the best of bad circumstances so that life may go on, children play in the streets, old men be buried without scars.

Grape and grain will come to harvestime on soil free from blood’s enduring pollution.