REDEEMER — one who BUYS BACK. GA'AL is not a religious abstraction but a family obligation in Israelite law: the go'el is the nearest kinsman with both the standing and the duty to recover what a relative has lost — to buy back sold land, to ransom a relative sold into servitude, to marry a childless widow, to avenge a killing (Leviticus 25:25-55 and Numbers 35, both already on these pages). ⭐ Numbers 35:12 is the one verse that calls him a BARE go’el, with no ‘of blood’ after it — from v19 on he is always go’el ha-dam — so a Hebrew reader meets the family word before learning which of the kinsman’s duties is in view. Three versions independently reach for the family there: the Douay-Rheims ‘the kinsman of him that is slain’, the Living Bible ‘the dead man’s relatives’, and the RV 1909 «del pariente», which its own 1960 revision replaces with «del vengador». Its FIRST occurrence in the Bible is here, in a blessing over two boys: 'the angel who has REDEEMED me from all evil' (48:16). Jacob places it in apposition with 'the God who has shepherded me' — whether identifying the angel WITH God or distinguishing him from God is grammatically open, and readers have gone both ways for two thousand years. The word goes on to carry Boaz in Ruth, the jubilee laws, and a great deal of Isaiah. KJV 'the Angel which redeemed me from all evil.' ⭐ In the compound go'el ha-dam, the redeemer of blood, it stands in eleven verses of the Hebrew Bible — five in Numbers 35, two in Deuteronomy 19, three in Joshua 20, and exactly one narrative, 2 Samuel 14:11, where a woman of Tekoa asks David to restrain him from destroying her surviving son. ⚠ The whole English shelf calls him the AVENGER of blood, which loses the family law the title is built on; the Douay's 'the next kinsman of him whose blood was shed' and the RV 1909's «el pariente del muerto» are closer. The office that buys back a field and the office that hunts down a killer are the same office, and Hebrew uses one word for both. → first discussed at Gen 48:16