REFUGE — and, in the Hebrew Bible, essentially one thing: the six towns of Numbers 35. ⭐ Searched consonantally across the whole Hebrew Bible the noun stands in twenty verses, eleven of them in that one chapter (vv6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 25, 26, 27, 28, 32). The other nine are the passages that carry the law out or list its towns — Joshua 20 twice, Joshua 21 five times, 1 Chronicles 6 twice, none of them yet on these pages. ⚠ So it is not a general word for shelter that happens to be applied to these cities; it exists for them, and the lexicons build it on a verb qalat, to take in or receive — though that verb never actually occurs in the Hebrew Bible in that sense, so the derivation is the lexicons’ and not something the text shows. ⚠ The versions largely agree on ‘refuge’ — the interesting divergence is the Douay-Rheims, which at v6 drops the phrase and reads ‘six shall be separated for refuge to fugitives’, making the town’s purpose a verb rather than its name. → first discussed at Num 35:6