Chapter 20

¹Yahweh spoke to Joshua, saying, ²Speak to the children of Israel, saying, Assign you the cities of refuge, of which I spoke to you by Moses, ³that the manslayer who kills any person unwittingly and unawares may flee there: and they shall be to you for a refuge from the avenger of blood. ⁴He shall flee to one of those cities, and shall stand at the entrance of the gate of the city, and declare his cause in the ears of the elders of that city; and they shall take him into the city to them, and give him a place, that he may dwell among them. ⁵If the avenger of blood pursue after him, then they shall not deliver up the manslayer into his hand; because he struck his neighbor unawares, and didn’t hate him before. ⁶He shall dwell in that city, until he stand before the congregation for judgment, until the death of the high priest that shall be in those days: then shall the manslayer return, and come to his own city, and to his own house, to the city from whence he fled. ⁷They set apart Kedesh in Galilee in the hill country of Naphtali, and Shechem in the hill country of Ephraim, and Kiriath Arba (the same is Hebron) in the hill country of Judah. ⁸Beyond the Jordan at Jericho eastward, they assigned Bezer in the wilderness in the plain out of the tribe of Reuben, and Ramoth in Gilead out of the tribe of Gad, and Golan in Bashan out of the tribe of Manasseh. ⁹These were the appointed cities for all the children of Israel, and for the stranger who sojourns among them, that whoever kills any person unwittingly might flee there, and not die by the hand of the avenger of blood, until he stood before the congregation.