★★ The word is not here, and it is not anywhere else in this book either. Miqlat, refuge, is the fixed legal term for these towns, and searched consonantally it stands in twenty verses of the Hebrew Bible: eleven in Numbers 35, seven in Joshua, two in 1 Chronicles. Eleven plus seven plus two is twenty, and Deuteronomy is not on the list. Neither this chapter nor 4:41–43, where Moses sets apart the first three, ever reaches for it. Deuteronomy says three cities, and leaves it at that.

⭐ Two versions on the shelf put the word back in, and one of them capitalises it. The TLB prints ‘you must set apart three Cities of Refuge’ here, and again at v9 (‘three additional Cities of Refuge’) and v11 (‘one of the Cities of Refuge’) — a proper noun, in a chapter with no noun to make proper. The Douay supplies it at v12 as well, where the Hebrew says only from there — see that note. ⚠ This is not a mistranslation so much as a translator’s reflex — every reader knows what these towns are called — but the reflex fills in the one gap the chapter is deliberately leaving. Numbers has the institution and the name. Deuteronomy has the institution and a road.

★ Two verbs here are doing work that no single English word can carry. Tavdil, you shall set apart, stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible — v2 and v7, both of them in this chapter — and it is the priestly word for separating holy from common, the verb of the first day of creation dividing light from darkness. Deuteronomy 4:41 uses its third-person form of Moses doing it himself. And ve-shillashta in v3 is a verb made out of the number three: you shall three the territory of your land. The KJV unpacks it as ‘divide the coasts of thy land … into three parts’ and the ASV as ‘divide the borders of thy land … into three parts’; both need six or seven words for one.

⚠ And the road is the point of the whole paragraph, which one version reads as measurement instead. Takhin lekha ha-derekh — you shall prepare the road for yourself — is a public-works order: the towns are useless if a frightened man cannot reach one. The NIV renders it ‘Determine the distances involved’, which turns a road-building command into a surveying one and is alone on either shelf in doing so; the Douay goes the other way with ‘Paving diligently the way’, and the NWT 2013 keeps the sense but pluralises to ‘prepare the roads’. ⚠ The rabbinic tradition is reported to read this verse as requiring signposts at every junction — which is a fair reading of what obeying it would take, but this page has not gone to the source, so it is passed on as reported rather than verified.

The Bible almost never gives a worked example, and this is one. Two men go into the forest to cut wood; one swings; the head comes off the handle; the other man is dead and nobody meant anything. The law needs a case of a killing with no motive behind it, and rather than define the category it stages it. ⚠ Note the verb the iron gets: it finds his neighbour, u-matza, the ordinary word for finding something you were looking for. The one thing in the sentence with intent is the axe-head.

★ One Hebrew word does three jobs in that verse, and the shelf hides two of them. Etz is wood, a tree, and timber: they go to cut etzim, he swings to fell the etz, and the iron slips from the etz. This translation prints wood … the tree … the wood so the third one is audible. The KJV and ASV both reach for a dead English word instead — ‘the head slippeth from the helve’ — and the Geneva had it first, ‘if the head slip from the helve’. ⭐ The two most literal witnesses keep the metal. The NWT 1984 reads ‘the iron has slipped off from the wooden handle’ and the TNM 1987 «el hierro se haya salido del mango de madera»; the RV 1909 and RV60 also print hierro. The NIV and TLB both say ‘axhead’, which is what it is and not what it says. The Hebrew names the material, and the material is why the next occurrence of the word matters: the same garzen stands in four verses of the Hebrew Bible — this one, Deuteronomy 20:19, where an army besieging a city may not swing one at a fruit tree, 1 Kings 6:7, where no iron tool is heard in the building of the temple, and Isaiah 10:15, where the axe boasts against the man who chops with it.

★★ ‘From yesterday and the day before’ is spelled two ways two verses apart. Verse 4 writes mit’mol shilshom defectively and v6 writes it plene — the same idiom, two spellings, and a consonantal search for either finds only half of it. Together the two spellings stand in six verses of the Hebrew Bible: Exodus 21:29 of an ox known to gore, Deuteronomy 4:42, these two, Joshua 3:4 and Joshua 20:5.

⭐ The oldest witness on each shelf keeps the idiom, and the modern revisions flatten it. The Douay alone in English prints it out at v4 — ‘no hatred against him yesterday and the day before’ — and then loses it at v6, where it reads ‘no hatred before’. The RV 1909 keeps it in both verses, «no le tenía enemistad desde ayer ni antes de ayer», and the RV60 revised it away in both to «anteriormente». The KJV and ASV say ‘in time past’, the Geneva ‘in time passed’, and the NWT 1984 ‘he was no hater of him formerly’. ⚠ This translation now prints the idiom at 4:42 too, which previously read ‘not having hated him before’; the two verses are near-identical in Hebrew and were not near-identical on these pages.

★ The pursuer’s title is a family word, not a police one. Go’el ha-dam stands in eleven verses of the Hebrew Bible: five in Numbers 35, two here, three in Joshua 20, and one narrative — 2 Samuel 14:11, where a woman of Tekoa begs David to restrain him from destroying her surviving son. ⚠ Eleven of the thirteen call him an avenger — the KJV and Geneva ‘the avenger of the blood’, the ASV, NIV, NWT 1984 and its 2013 revision ‘the avenger of blood’, the TLB ‘the angry avenger’, the TNM 1987 and TNM 2019 «el vengador de la sangre», the RV60 «el vengador de la sangre» too, and the NVI «el enfurecido vengador del delito de sangre». ⭐ Two call him a relative instead, one on each shelf, and those two are closer to the Hebrew: the Douay’s ‘the next kinsman of him whose blood was shed’ and the RV 1909’s «el pariente del muerto». A go’el is the nearest relative with the standing to buy back what the family has lost — the same office, and the same word, that Boaz takes up in Ruth. This chapter simply extends the ledger to a life.

⚠ And the phrase the law hangs on is one that two witnesses keep as a noun, and both of them lose it in their own later revision. Ein mishpat mavet — there is no sentence of death for him — stands in four verses of the Hebrew Bible: this one, Deuteronomy 21:22, and twice in Jeremiah 26, where it is argued in both directions inside a single chapter. The priests and prophets say of Jeremiah a sentence of death for this man, and the princes and the people answer there is no sentence of death for this man, which is this verse’s exact clause turned into a verdict. Ten of the thirteen turn it into a judgement about the man’s desert: the KJV, ASV and Geneva all say ‘not worthy of death’, the NIV ‘not deserving of death’, the Douay ‘not guilty of death’, the RV 1909 and RV60 «no debiendo ser condenado», the NVI «no merece la muerte», and the TLB ‘he should not have died’. ⭐ Two print the noun, and they are one translation in two languages — the NWT 1984’s ‘there is no sentence of death for him’ and the TNM 1987’s «no hay sentencia de muerte». ⚠ And each is abandoned by its own revision, the 2013 reading ‘he did not deserve to die’ and the TNM 2019 «no merecía morir» — which is the same movement three notes on takes away sarah. Worthiness is a judgement about the man; a mishpat is a ruling about the case.

★★ The chapter orders three cities, then orders three more, and the second order never takes effect anywhere in the Bible. Verse 8 makes it conditional twice over: if Jehovah enlarges your territory as he swore, and if you keep all this commandment. Add 4:41–43’s three east of the Jordan and the arithmetic of the book is 3 + 3 + 3 = 9. ⚠ Joshua 20 lists six, and no later text adds another. Whether that is because the border was never enlarged, or because the condition attached to obedience was never satisfied, is not something the text says — it simply stops counting at six. ⚠ The rabbinic tradition is reported to read the unbuilt three as future rather than failed — again passed on as reported rather than verified — which is one honest way to hold an unfulfilled clause; recording that it was never carried out is another, and this page does the second.

What the extra three tell you is what the towns are for. They scale with the map, not with the crime rate: more land means longer roads, longer roads mean the manslayer is caught before he arrives, and v6 has already said that is the danger. The whole institution is a race, and the law is trying to shorten it.

⚠ Two versions add arithmetic the Hebrew does not have. The Douay closes v9 with ‘and shalt double the number of the three cities aforesaid’ — a clause with no counterpart in the Masoretic text, and one that also gets the sum wrong, since three added to three is not a doubling of six. The TLB rewrites v6 into a paragraph of civil engineering: ‘These cities must be scattered so that one of them will be reasonably close to everyone’. ⚠ Both are supplying what a reader might want to know. Neither is translating.

★ ‘And bloodguilt be upon you’ is two words, and the second is a plural. Ve-hayah alekha damim — literally and there shall be upon you bloods. Hebrew pluralises dam when it means the guilt of shed blood rather than the substance, so the plural is the idiom and not an intensification. The KJV and Geneva keep the shape with ‘and so blood be upon thee’ and ‘lest blood be upon thee’; the NWT 1984 names the concept, ‘no bloodguilt has to be upon you’, and the NVI reaches for a legal category the verse does not use, «tú no serás culpable de homicidio» — guilty of homicide, which is precisely what the man in v4 is not.

The murderer runs to the same town and it does not save him. That is the structural point of the paragraph: sanctuary is not a place, it is a verdict. The elders send and take him from there — out of the city, past its threshold — and hand him over. ⚠ The Hebrew says only from there, and the Douay names the place it will not: ‘take him out of the place of refuge’ — the Douay’s one insertion of a word this book never uses, against the TLB’s three, and the pay-off of the chapter’s opening note. The Hebrew never says the city was wrong to let him in either; it says the elders come and get him. Asylum is granted first and examined afterwards, which is the opposite of how the institution is usually imagined.

★★ ‘These cities’ is written here with a form the Bible uses three times, and the first time is Sodom. Verse 5 writes he-arim ha-eleh, the ordinary demonstrative. Verse 11, six verses later, writes he-arim ha-el — an archaic plural form that stands in three verses of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 19:25, where God overthrows these cities and all the Plain; Deuteronomy 4:42; and this. ⚠ The count needs reading rather than matching, because the archaic form’s letters are the opening of the ordinary one’s and a string search cannot tell them apart. Two of the three are towns that keep a man alive. The first is the two that were destroyed.

★ The three verbs of ambush are stacked, and one of them is not the word it looks like. He hates, he lies in wait, he rises against him, he strikes. Arav, to lie in wait, begins with an aleph; the arav already on these pages — Judah standing surety for Benjamin — begins with an ayin and is a different root entirely. ⚠ Two words that are homographs once the vowel points come off, and the library carries them as two entries rather than one, which is the same discipline chapter 18 applied to kashaph and chapter 16 paid for with matsevah.

⚠ The chapter’s first ‘your eye shall not pity’, and a formula that swaps its object here and nowhere else. Deuteronomy’s standard closing sentence is u-vi’arta ha-ra mi-qirbekha, you shall burn out the evil from your midst, and it stands in nine verses, every one of them in this book — 13:6, 17:7, 17:12, 19:19, and five later ones. ⭐ Verse 13 is not one of them: it substitutes an object, you shall burn out THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT from Israel, and swaps from your midst for from Israel. The thing burned out is not the killer and not the wrong — it is the blood itself, treated as a contaminant with a location. The KJV and NWT 1984 both supply an abstraction the Hebrew does not have, ‘put away the guilt of innocent blood’ and ‘clear away the guilt of innocent blood’; the ASV keeps it concrete with ‘put away the innocent blood from Israel’.

A one-verse law, dropped between homicide and false testimony, with its own scribal break on each side. It looks misplaced and is not: a boundary marker is what a witness is for. Land had no register and no survey; the stones were the record, and moving one at night is a crime that can only be answered by somebody who remembers where it stood. The verse before it ends a homicide law and the verse after it opens the law of witnesses, and this sits between them because it is the case where testimony is the only evidence there is.

★★ It is the only time the Torah legislates it. Lo tassig — you shall not move back — stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, this one. The idea recurs, but never again as a command with a penalty: Deuteronomy 27:17 makes it a curse rather than a statute, Proverbs twice makes it a proverb, Hosea 5:10 makes it a simile for princes, and Job 24:2 makes it a complaint. ⚠ None of those is a law. The one law is here, and it has no penalty attached either.

★ The verb inside the relative clause is made out of the noun in front of it, and two of the thirteen witnesses keep an echo of that. Gevul re’akha asher gavlu rishonim — your neighbour’s boundary, which the first ones bounded. Ten of the thirteen turn the second word into an unrelated verb of placing: the KJV, ASV and Geneva all read ‘which they of old time have set’, the Douay ‘which thy predecessors have set’, the NIV ‘set up by your predecessors’, the RV 1909 «el cual señalaron los antiguos», the RV60 «que fijaron los antiguos», the NVI «la que hace mucho tiempo fue señalada», the TNM 1987 «hayan fijado los límites» and the TNM 2019 «los pusieron los antepasados». ⭐ Two do echo it, and it is the pair this shelf keeps rewarding: the NWT 1984 writes ‘the boundary marks of your fellowman, when the ancestors will have set the boundaries’, and its 2013 revision keeps the echo, ‘boundary marker from the place where the ancestors set the boundaries’. ⚠ The thirteenth is the TLB, which does not translate the clause at all: ‘you must never steal a man’s land by moving the boundary marker’. The rishonim are simply gone.

⚠ And rishonim is not quite ‘ancestors’. It is the plural of the adjective first — the earlier ones, the ones who came before — and Hebrew has perfectly good words for fathers and forefathers, both of which this chapter uses eight verses earlier at v8. The claim the verse is making is not about descent but about priority: whoever was here first drew the line, and their being first is the whole of their authority. ⭐ Proverbs, making the same point twice as a proverb rather than a law, does reach for descent — al tasseg gevul olam asher asu avotekha, an ancient boundary which your fathers made (Proverbs 22:28, and 23:10 without the clause). Deuteronomy declines to say whose fathers. ⭐ Which is why the law needs no penalty. It is not protecting a man’s field so much as the idea that a line can outlast the person who drew it, and the next verse is about the only mechanism a village has for making that true.

★★ Chapter 17 gave this rule for capital cases. This verse lifts it to everything, and the two are not the same sentence. 17:6 reads al pi shnayim edim o shloshah edim and ends the dead shall be put to death. This verse reads al pi shnei edim o al pi shloshah edim and ends a matter shall stand. ⚠ The numeral is written differently in each. Shnayim edim stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, which is 17:6. Shnei edim stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, which is this one. Only the second half is shared: o shloshah edim stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible, and they are those same two. ⭐ And the scope is the real difference. 17:6 is about a death sentence; this verse says for any iniquity or any sin, in any sin he sins — three words for wrongdoing piled up so that nothing falls outside. A rule invented to make executions hard has become the standard of proof for everything.

★★ Which is why the New Testament quotes this verse and not that one. Matthew 18:16 reads ἐπὶ στόματος δύο μαρτύρων ἢ τριῶν σταθῇ πᾶν ῥῆμα — at the mouth of two witnesses or three every matter may stand. Πᾶν ῥῆμα is kol davar, and kol davar is in this verse and not in 17:6, whose object is a condemned man. Jesus is applying the courtroom rule to a quarrel between two believers, which is exactly the widening this verse performed. ⚠ John 8:17 cites the same law and drops the three: in your law it is written that the testimony of two men is true. Two is the floor; three was never a requirement.

★ Numbers has the rule without a number. Numbers 35:30, the chapter this one is reworking, says at the mouth of witnesses, plural and uncounted, and then adds the negative half — one witness shall not testify against a person for him to die. Deuteronomy supplies the figure. ⚠ Note also what the rule does not do: it sets a minimum count and says nothing about quality, so two liars clear the bar. The next four verses exist because of that gap.

⚠ Four witnesses on the shelf improve the law, and one of them adds a preference the Hebrew never expresses. The TLB reads ‘There must be at least two, and three is even better’ — a preference the verse does not express; two or three in Hebrew legal idiom is a way of saying more than one, not a ranking. The NIV and NVI both introduce conviction (‘not enough to convict anyone accused of any crime’, «no bastará para condenar»), and the NWT 2013 follows them with ‘No single witness may convict another’ where its own 1984 edition had the Hebrew’s bare verb, ‘No single witness should rise up against a man’. ⚠ Rising up against a man is what a witness does before there is a verdict to convict with. The ASV and KJV both keep ‘rise up against a man’, and the Geneva keeps the verb one word shorter, ‘shall not rise against a man’.

★★ The Hebrew calls him a witness of violence, and this translation deliberately does not. Ed chamas stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible: this one and Exodus 23:1, where the same phrase closes the command not to spread a false report. Chamas is the flood word — the earth’s indictment in Genesis 6, lawless wrong — so the phrase says that perjury is not a lie about violence but an instance of it. ⚠ And yet a witness of violence cannot be printed in English, because an English reader will take it to mean somebody who saw violence, which is the opposite. So this page prints a malicious witness, matching what Exodus 23:1 already carries, and puts the Hebrew here. That is the reader test doing its job: the literal rendering is not the accurate one.

★★ The charge he brings is the word Deuteronomy uses of a false prophet, and four of the shelf’s six revisions have thrown it away. Sarah — revolt, defection, turning aside — is what 13:6 convicts the dream-prophet of: he has spoken revolt against Jehovah. The noun stands in two verses of Deuteronomy, there and here, and this chapter puts it in the mouth of a man in a courtroom. ⭐ The library entry chapter 13 wrote said so in advance — the noun stands in only two verses of the Torah, that one and Deuteronomy 19:16 — and this is the second. ⭐ On both shelves the older edition keeps it and the newer drops it. The NWT 1984 reads ‘to bring a charge of revolt against him’; its 2013 revision reads ‘charges him with some transgression’. The TNM 1987 reads «una acusación de sublevación»; the TNM 2019 reads «lo acusa de violar alguna ley». The RV 1909 reads «para testificar contra él rebelión»; the RV60 deletes the object entirely, «para testificar contra él». Three version-families, three revisions, all moving the same way. ⚠ The other seven never had it — the ASV reads ‘wrong-doing’, the KJV ‘that which is wrong’, the Geneva ‘to accuse him of trespass’, the Douay ‘accusing him of transgression’, the NIV ‘to accuse someone of a crime’, the NVI «acusa a alguien de un crimen», and the TLB replaces the noun with a story, ‘claiming he has seen someone do wrong when he hasn’t’. Three keep it, three lost it in revision, seven never had it: thirteen. What is lost each time is the link: the false witness and the false prophet are charged in the same vocabulary, one chapter after 18:20 sentenced the second of them.

★ The case is called a riv, which pays off a word chapter 17 introduced two chapters ago. 17:8 used the plural for the class of matter a village bench sends upward; here the singular names one live dispute with two men standing in it. ⚠ And Exodus 23:2 — the very next verse after the other ed chamas — forbids answering al riv, in a lawsuit, so as to lean after a crowd. The two halves of this chapter’s courtroom vocabulary come out of two consecutive verses of the Covenant Code.

⚠ Where the trial happens is not a courthouse. The two men stand before Jehovah, and then the verse says what that means: before the priests and the judges. This is the central sanctuary of 17:8–13, and the clause who are in those days is the same acknowledgment 17:9 made that the personnel will change and the institution will not. ⚠ Two versions relocate the scene into furniture the chapter does not have; both do it at v20, so that note carries them.

★★ This is the sharpest sentence in the chapter and it punishes an intention. You shall do to him as he plotted to do to his brother. Not as he did — the false witness is caught before the sentence lands, so nothing has been done. What he gets is the punishment his testimony was aiming at. ⚠ Compare Leviticus 24:19, which is the same shape with the other verb: as he has done, so shall it be done to him. Leviticus measures the deed; Deuteronomy measures the plan. The whole later argument about whether the perjurer is executed only if the accused was not, or in any case, is an argument about this one word.

★ And the word is normally God’s. Zamam stands in five verses of the Hebrew Bible. Three of them have Jehovah as the subject: Lamentations 2:17, Jehovah has done what he purposed; Jeremiah 51:12 of Babylon; and Zechariah 1:6, whose clause is this verse’s twin word for word — as Jehovah of hosts purposed to do to us … so has he done with us. The fourth is Psalm 37:12, the wicked plotting against the righteous. The fifth is here. ⭐ So the verb for a settled, unbudgeable purpose is used four times of God or of the wicked, and once of a man in a witness box — which is a judgement on him before any sentence is passed. ⚠ Four of the thirteen witnesses reach for plotting and nine settle for thinking. The four are both editions on each side of the JW shelf: the NWT 1984 and its 2013 revision both read ‘just as he had schemed to do to his brother’, the TNM 1987 «como él había tramado hacer» and the TNM 2019 «lo que había tramado hacerle». ⭐ Which is worth noticing beside the previous note: on sarah those same four split three verses earlier, the older editions keeping the hard word and the newer dropping it. Here all four hold. The other nine soften: the ASV reads ‘as he had thought to do unto his brother’, the Geneva the same, the KJV ‘as he had thought to have done unto his brother’, the Douay ‘as he meant to do to his brother’, the NIV ‘as that witness intended to do’, the TLB ‘the punishment he thought the other man would get’, the RV 1909 and RV60 «como él pensó hacer», and the NVI «lo mismo que se proponía hacerle».

★★ The running grammatical-number study: twelve of twenty-one verses carry a second-person marker, every one of them singular, and the single exception sits inside this verse. Verses 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 19, 20 and 21 address a you; the other nine are third-person case law with no addressee at all. Every marker in all twelve is singular except v19’s opening word, va’asitem, you [plural] shall do to him — and three words later the same verse swings back, u-vi’arta … mi-qirbekha, you [singular] shall burn out … from your midst. ⭐ The plural is the court and the singular is Israel. Carrying out the sentence is something a body of men does; being the kind of nation that has no such men in it is something the nation is told. ⚠ Chapter 17 found its one plural sitting on an unrecorded quotation and chapter 18 found its one plural on the clause Acts quotes; this one sits on an execution. Three chapters, three single exceptions, three different jobs — and no book-wide figure is claimed here, because the corpus scan that would support one could not be reproduced when chapter 17 tried. These twenty-one verses were read.

⭐ English cannot print that switch and Spanish can, so the two editions of this page genuinely differ — and the shelf splits the same way. Modern English lost the singular thou, so the English verse above says you twice and this note carries the difference; the Spanish verse says harán and then quitarás, and needs no note at all. Only two English witnesses manage it, and both are archaic: the ASV reads ‘then shall ye do unto him’ and then ‘so shalt thou put away the evil from the midst of thee’, and the Geneva reads ‘Then shall ye do unto him’ and then ‘so thou shalt take evil away forth of the midst of thee’. ⚠ The KJV gets the first two right and loses the third, ‘so shalt thou put the evil away from among you’, where the Hebrew is singular. ⭐ The NWT 1984 is the only modern English version on the shelf that shows it at all, and it does so typographically: ‘YOU must also do to him’ in capitals, its own convention for a plural, against a lower-case ‘you must clear away’. Its 2013 revision drops the capitals and the distinction with them. On the Spanish shelf the RV 1909, RV60, NVI, TNM 1987 and TNM 2019 all keep it, because Spanish still has the grammar to.

Verse 20 states the purpose plainly and it is deterrence. Ve-ha-nish’arim, those who remain, stands in five verses of the Hebrew Bible, and the company is grim: Genesis 14:10, the survivors of the kings fleeing to the hills; Leviticus 26:36 and 26:39, the survivors of the curse rotting in enemy lands; Ezekiel 17:21; and this. ⚠ Everywhere else the remainder is what is left after a catastrophe. Here it is simply everybody who was not on trial. ⭐ And two versions furnish the scene with a courtroom the chapter has not got. The TLB ends the verse ‘afraid to tell lies on the witness stand’ — a witness box, in a proceeding held at a sanctuary gate; and the Douay deletes the closing in your midst altogether, reading only ‘That others hearing may fear, and may not dare to do such things’, which turns a sentence about a nation’s interior into a sentence about deterring strangers.

★★ The Torah gives this list three times and Deuteronomy writes it with a different preposition from the other two. Exodus 21:23–25 reads nefesh TACHAT nafesh, ayin TACHAT ayin, and Leviticus 24:18–20 the same — tachat is under, in place of, a substitution. This verse writes nefesh BE-nefesh, ayin BE-ayin, and be- is the preposition of price: it is the for in bought for silver. ⭐ Nefesh be-nefesh stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, this one. Nefesh tachat nafesh stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible. Ayin tachat ayin stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible. Both pairs are the Exodus and Leviticus passages. The most quoted sentence in the chapter is written in a form that occurs nowhere else.

★ And two of those same words mean the opposite somewhere else. Ayin be-ayin stands in three verses of the Hebrew Bible, and only one of them is talion. At Numbers 14:14, already on these pages, the nations have heard that Jehovah is seen eye to eye; at Isaiah 52:8 the watchmen see eye to eye when Jehovah returns to Zion. ⚠ Two identical words, and the difference between an eye for an eye and face to face is entirely context. That is a caution about consonantal searching generally, and it is why this project reads its hits instead of quoting its tallies.

★★ What the sentence is doing here is limiting a punishment, not licensing one — and its placement is the proof. The list is famous as a slogan for savagery, and it is routinely quoted as the thing the Sermon on the Mount replaced: Matthew 5:38, Ἐκούσατε ὅτι ἐρρέθη· ὀφθαλμὸν ἀντὶ ὀφθαλμοῦ. ⚠ But in this chapter it is not attached to an injury at all. Nobody has lost an eye. It is attached to the false witness, and it means: he receives exactly what he tried to obtain, and not one thing more. The measure is a ceiling. In a world of blood feud — which is the world v6 describes, a kinsman running down a road with his heart hot — a rule that caps retaliation at parity is a restraint on vengeance and not an incitement to it. ⭐ The chapter opens by protecting a man from a relative who would kill him for an accident and closes by capping what a court may do to a liar; those are the same argument.

⚠ The Hebrew has no verb after the colon, and almost everybody supplies one. Ve-lo tachos einekha: and then five bare pairs. The KJV and ASV supply motion — ‘life shall go for life’ — the Douay supplies a demand, ‘but shalt require life for life’, the NVI supplies collection, «Cobra vida por vida», and the TLB supplies both a defendant and a rubric: ‘You shall not show pity to a false witness … this is your rule in such cases’. The NWT 1984 supplies the smallest possible thing, the copula — ‘soul will be for soul’ — and the RV 1909 and RV60 supply nothing at all, «vida por vida, ojo por ojo», which is exactly the Hebrew’s shape. ⚠ One small slip worth recording: the ASV alone prints ‘thine eyes’, plural, where the Hebrew has the singular einekha it rendered correctly eight verses earlier at v13.

★ And the chapter’s last word answers its own beginning. Lo tachos einekha stands twice here, at v13 and v21 — once over a murderer dragged out of sanctuary, once over a perjurer. Both times the eye that is forbidden to pity belongs to the person carrying out the sentence, not to the judge who passed it. ⚠ Tachos einekha, YOUR eye shall pity, stands in five verses of the Hebrew Bible, and all five are in this book — 7:16, 13:9, these two, and 25:12.

★ The head verb reaches further, and the other six occurrences change whose eye it is. It stands in eleven verses of the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah 13:18 gives it to the Medes — their eye shall not pity children. And five times in Ezekiel it is God’s own: lo tachos eini, MY eye shall not pity, at 5:11, 7:4, 7:9, 8:18 and 9:10 — every one of the five pairing it with ve-lo echmol, neither will I have compassion, which is the exact double 13:9 uses of the Israelite who must not spare his own brother. Five for you, one for your enemies, five for God.