⚠ The verb of the sixth commandment, and NOT the general word for killing — that is harag, which does not appear in Exodus 20 at all. Ratzach is narrower: Numbers 35 uses it throughout of the MANSLAYER who kills and flees to a city of refuge, covering deliberate killing and what we would call manslaughter. ⚠⚠ It is NOT used of killing in war, nor of slaughtering animals — both hold across all forty-five occurrences. But it IS used of judicial killing, and Numbers 35 is where that shows: at v27 the redeemer of blood ratzaches the rotzeach and incurs no bloodguilt, and at v30 the court itself does so at the mouth of witnesses. (An earlier version of this entry said the verb is not used of judicial execution; those two verses refute it, and the correction sharpens the point rather than blunting it.) So 'thou shalt not KILL' (KJV, ASV, RV 'no mataras') is broader than the Hebrew and 'you must not MURDER' (NWT) is narrower — but neither is quite it: ratzach is not a moral verdict built into a verb, it is a word for the killing of a person, which Numbers 35 then SORTS. ⭐ That chapter is the word’s home: 20 of its 45 biblical occurrences stand there, in 14 of its 34 verses. The difference has carried real weight in arguments about capital punishment and war. ⚠ The English of this project is not yet consistent about the participle: Numbers 35 mostly prints ‘the killer’, while Deuteronomy 4:42 and Deuteronomy 19 print ‘manslayer’ — the Spanish says homicida throughout. Both English words are defensible and the split is recorded here rather than quietly harmonised. ⭐ Deuteronomy 19 is where the sorting Numbers 35 began gets its worked example: the man the sixth commandment forbids becoming is also the man the chapter builds three towns to protect. → first discussed at Exod 20:12