Numbers 35:1-8 — Levitical cities and the ‘pastureland’: forty-eight towns, a name built on the verb for driving people out, and a measurement that does not add up

The tribe with no land gets forty-eight towns. Numbers 34, already on these pages, drew the outline of Canaan and named the ten men who would cut it up; this chapter starts cutting. Levi was excluded from that allotment on purpose — the tribe holds no territory — so the other tribes surrender towns out of their own shares, six of which will do a second job the rest of the chapter is about. The arithmetic is stated twice and it checks: six cities of refuge (v6) plus forty-two others is forty-eight (v7).

⚠ V8 is a proportional levy, and it is the fairest sentence in the chapter: me-et ha-rav tarbu u-me-et ha-me’at tam’itu, ‘from the many you shall take many, and from the few you shall take few’. A tribe is taxed in towns at the rate of what it received. The ASV keeps the Hebrew’s bare symmetry almost word for word: ‘from the many ye shall take many; and from the few ye shall take few’. The NWT 1984 has the same shape in its own pronouns, ‘From the many YOU will take many, and from the few YOU will take few’. The KJV supplies a verb the Hebrew has not got, ‘from them that have many ye shall give many’; Geneva 1599 turns it into a comparison instead, ‘of many ye shall take more, and of few ye shall take less’; and the NIV reorganises the sentence around an abstract noun, ‘in proportion to the inheritance of each tribe’ — which is what it means and not what it says.

⚠⚠ The land around each town is a migrash, and the lexicons build that noun on garash, the verb for DRIVING OUT. It is the place you drive the animals out to. The same verb does harder work elsewhere in this project’s own pages: at Exodus 23:29-30 Jehovah promises to DRIVE OUT the inhabitants of Canaan ‘little by little… until you are fruitful and inherit the land’, and at Numbers 22:6 it is exactly what Balak hires Balaam to accomplish — ‘that I may drive them out of the land’. So the Levites’ cattle graze on ground whose name is the verb of dispossession. ⚠ The word is not rare, but it is concentrated: searched consonantally it stands in sixty-eight verses of the Hebrew Bible, and the great majority of them are the Levitical-town lists that carry out this chapter.

⚠ The thirteen reach for eight different words, and the spread is the point. The KJV, ASV and Geneva 1599 all print ‘suburbs’, which in 1611 meant the open ground under a town wall and now means something with a driveway. The NIV and Living Bible read ‘pasturelands’; the NWT 1984 ‘pasture ground’ and its 2013 revision ‘pastures’; the Douay-Rheims keeps ‘suburbs’ from the Vulgate. On the Spanish shelf both Reina-Valeras say «ejidos» — the common land of a village, a word with four centuries of law behind it in Spain and Mexico — while the NVI modernises to «campos de pastoreo» and the TNM 1987 reaches for «dehesa», the Iberian wooded pasture, which its own 2019 revision then drops for «campos de pasto». Eight different pictures of one piece of ground — and the only real agreement is the oldest one: the KJV, ASV, Geneva 1599 and Douay-Rheims all print ‘suburbs’, and both Reina-Valeras «ejidos».

⚠⚠⚠ And then the measurement contradicts itself. V4 says the pastureland runs a thousand cubits out from the wall. V5 says to measure two thousand cubits on each of the four sides, with the city in the middle. Both numbers are in the Masoretic text, and eleven of the thirteen carry the contradiction across unchanged; this project does not resolve it either — the seam is shown, not sanded. Two explanations are old and standard, and are reported here as explanations rather than as findings: that the thousand is an inner belt and the two thousand the outer edge of a second, wider band; or that the two thousand measures the whole side of a square whose centre is the town, so that the thousand is the distance from the wall and the two thousand the full run of the side. Neither is stated by the text.

⚠ One version does not report the difficulty; it dissolves it. The Living Bible merges vv3-5 into a single sentence and supplies the concentric scheme outright: ‘Their gardens and vineyards shall extend 1500 feet out from the city walls in each direction, with an additional 1500 feet beyond that for pastureland.’ Two bands, two purposes, and the arithmetic closed. Whether or not the harmonisation is right, a reader of that version will never know a question was there. ⚠ The Douay-Rheims creates a smaller version of the same effect by accident of unit: following the Vulgate’s mille passus it prints ‘a thousand PACES’ at v4 and ‘two thousand CUBITS’ at v5, so its two verses are not even measuring in the same thing.

⚠⚠ The two thousand cubits of v5 outlived the towns. Rabbinic law fixed the distance a person might walk on the sabbath at two thousand cubits, reasoning from ‘let no one go out of his place on the seventh day’ (Exodus 16:29) together with this verse — and that measure is still standing in the New Testament: Acts 1:12, already on these pages, puts the Mount of Olives ‘a sabbath day’s journey’ from Jerusalem, the only occurrence of the phrase in the Bible. A pasture boundary became a unit of Jewish time.

Numbers 35:9-15 — Cities of refuge: the word miqlat is more than half in this one chapter, the verb that appoints them is the verb of pure chance, and the man they protect you from is called a REDEEMER

⚠⚠ This is miqlat’s chapter, and the concentration is extreme. Searched consonantally across the whole Hebrew Bible, the noun stands in twenty verses. Eleven of them are here (vv6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 25, 26, 27, 28, 32). The other nine are the places that carry this law out or list its towns: Joshua 20 twice, Joshua 21 five times, and 1 Chronicles 6 twice — none of them yet on these pages. So the word for refuge, in Hebrew, has essentially one subject: these six towns. It is not a general word for shelter that happens to be applied to them; it exists for them.

⚠⚠⚠ V11’s verb is the strangest word in the chapter, and this translation has printed the strangeness rather than the meaning. Where nine of the thirteen say appoint, designate or choose, the Hebrew is ve-hiqritem — the causative of qarah, to happen, to befall, to be met with by chance. That exact form stands in one verse of the whole Hebrew Bible, this one. The plain noun from the same root is miqreh, which this project already renders FATE at Ecclesiastes 3:19, already on these pages: ‘the fate of the sons of man and the fate of the beast — one fate is theirs’. Elsewhere the causative asks God for a chance meeting: Genesis 24:12, already on these pages, has Abraham’s servant pray haqreh na lefanai at the well. And Ruth 2:3 (not yet on these pages) uses the noun for the coincidence that is not one — ‘her chance chanced’ upon the field of the man who turns out to be her redeemer.

So the sentence is doing something none of the thirteen lets a reader see. Even the four that hear the encounter-sense print a word about CONVENIENCE, which is a property of the town; the Hebrew’s word is about CHANCE, which is a property of what happened to the man running to it. Israel is told to make an ACCIDENT happen — deliberately, in advance, by statute — for people to whom an accident will happen. The whole institution is a planned response to the unplannable, and the Hebrew says so in its verb. This translation prints ‘cause cities to befall you’: awkward on purpose, because ‘appoint’ is smooth and silent.

⚠ Four of the thirteen hear part of it — and they are two versions and their own revisions, which is the pattern this chapter keeps meeting. The NWT 1984 and its 2013 revision read ‘choose cities CONVENIENT for yourselves’, and the TNM 1987 «ciudades que les sean convenientes» — catching the encounter-sense of the root, that the town must be one you can actually reach. Its 2019 revision sharpens that to «ciudades accesibles». The rest take the administrative sense and stop: KJV, ASV and Geneva 1599 ‘appoint’; NIV ‘select’; Douay-Rheims ‘determine’; both Reina-Valeras «os señalaréis». None is wrong; all are silent.

⚠⚠⚠ And at v12 the Hebrew calls the pursuer, once and once only, a bare go’el — a REDEEMER, with nothing after it. From v19 onward he is always go’el ha-dam, the redeemer of blood; but the first time he appears he is simply the redeemer, and a Hebrew reader meets the family word before learning which of the kinsman’s duties is in view. It is the same noun this project renders KINSMAN-REDEEMER at Leviticus 25:25, already on these pages, where he buys back a poor relative’s field — and the same office Boaz holds in Ruth. One man, in Israelite law, both ransoms your land and hunts your killer.

⚠⚠ Four versions supply the missing word and three independently reach for the family. Keeping v12 bare: KJV and ASV alike ‘from the avenger’, Geneva 1599 ‘from thy avenger’, NIV ‘from the avenger’, RV60 «del vengador», NVI «del vengador». Supplying it: the NWT 1984 ‘a refuge from the blood avenger’, its 2013 revision the same, and the TNM 1987 and 2019 alike «el vengador de la sangre». ⚠ That is worth naming plainly, because it runs against this shelf’s usual grain: the NWT and the ASV are normally the two most literal witnesses here, and at this verse the ASV is bare and the NWT is not.

⚠⚠ The three that reach for the kinsman are the three that are not translating from Hebrew, or not translating tightly. The Douay-Rheims, working from the Vulgate, rewrites v12 as ‘the KINSMAN of him that is slain may not have power to kill him’, and holds that reading at v19: ‘The kinsman of him that was slain, shall kill the murderer’. The Living Bible paraphrases to ‘the dead man’s relatives who want to avenge his death’. And the RV 1909 prints «del pariente», THE RELATIVE — which its own 1960 revision then replaces with «del vengador». The oldest Spanish witness on the shelf and the oldest Latin one agree with each other, and the revision moves away from both.

V15 opens the refuge to the ger and the toshav — the resident foreigner and the settler — on identical terms with Israelites. It is a small sentence with a large claim inside it: the protection is attached to the killing, not to the citizenship of the killer. ⚠ Ten of the thirteen keep the two categories apart; three collapse them into one. Keeping both: KJV ‘for the stranger, and for the sojourner among them’, ASV ‘for the stranger and for the sojourner among them’, NWT 1984 ‘for the alien resident and for the settler in the midst of them’, Geneva 1599 ‘for the stranger, and for him that dwelleth among you’, RV60 «para el extranjero y el que more entre ellos». Collapsing them: the NIV has only ‘for foreigners residing among them’, one category where the Hebrew has two; the NVI the same, hedged into «sean estos residentes o solo estén de paso»; and the Living Bible reads ‘for foreigners and travelers’ — where a toshav is precisely the one who has STOPPED travelling.

Numbers 35:16-21 — Ratzach: the verb of the sixth commandment stands twenty times in this chapter, out of forty-five in the whole Bible — and iron alone needs no proof that it can kill

⚠⚠⚠ This is the sixth commandment’s own verb, and this is its chapter. Ratzach is the word in lo tirtzach at Exodus 20:12, already on these pages, which this translation prints ‘You shall not murder’ (English Bibles number that verse 20:13). Searched consonantally across the archived text, the root stands in thirty-nine verses of the whole Hebrew Bible, forty-five times. Twenty of those forty-five are in this chapter — nearly half the word’s entire biblical career, in thirty-four verses. Every other occurrence in the book of Numbers is also here; the word appears nowhere else in it.

⚠⚠ Which forces a decision, and this translation has made it deliberately. Hebrew uses ONE word for the man who kills by accident and the man who kills in hatred: ha-rotzeach, the participle of that same verb, and the chapter’s entire business is to sort one word into two fates. Eleven of the thirteen versions use one word for the killer the law protects and a different one for the killer it executes, which hands the reader the verdict before the trial: at v11 the KJV has ‘the slayer may flee thither’ and at v16 ‘he is a murderer’; the ASV ‘the manslayer that killeth any person unwittingly’ (v11) then ‘he is a murderer’ (v16); Geneva 1599 ‘the slayer, which slayeth any person unawares’ then ‘he is a murderer’; the NWT 1984 ‘the manslayer must flee there’ then ‘he is a murderer’; the NIV ‘the accused’ (v25) against ‘murderer’ (v16); the Douay-Rheims ‘the refuge of fugitives’ (v11) against ‘guilty of murder’ (v16); the Living Bible ‘the slayer must not be killed’ (v12) against ‘the murderer must be executed’ (v16); the TNM 1987 «el homicida» (v11) then «es un asesino» (v16). This translation prints ‘the killer’ everywhere the Hebrew has the participle, because a word that has already decided destroys the argument the chapter is making.

⭐ And it is not alone — the two versions that agree are the oldest Spanish witness on the shelf and its own modern revision. The RV 1909 and the RV60 alike print «homicida» in all fourteen verses where the Hebrew has the root — vv6, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30 and 31 — and neither uses «asesino» once. One Hebrew word, one Spanish word, fourteen verses. ⚠ The NVI breaks with both of them: «homicida» survives only at v12, and from v16 onward it reads «asesino». So the Spanish shelf is split down its own middle on a question the English shelf never puts — whether a translator may decide, inside the verse, a thing the chapter has not decided yet.

⚠ That is a departure from this project’s own Exodus rendering, and it is a considered one. At Exodus 20:12 the verb has no object and no circumstances, and ‘murder’ carries the moral weight the commandment needs — the point there being precisely that Hebrew did NOT use harag, the general word for killing, which is absent from the Ten Words. Here the same verb is handed three different kinds of act in one chapter, and an English word that pre-judges would make vv22-23 read as nonsense.

⚠⚠ Vv16-18 list three murder weapons, and only two of them have to prove they are lethal. Iron gets no qualifying clause at all: ‘if he struck him with an instrument of iron and he died, he is a killer’. Stone and wood each carry one — asher yamut bah, ‘by which one may die’ — and each is additionally yad, ‘of the hand’. The text assumes iron kills whatever its size, and requires a finding of fact about the other two. The distinction is entirely visible in the Hebrew and needs no commentary to see.

⚠ The shelf splits on what yad is doing there, and the split is old. Reading a HAND-HELD stone: ASV ‘a stone in the hand’, RV 1909 «con piedra de mano», RV60 «con piedra en la mano», NIV ‘if anyone is holding a stone’. Reading a THROWN one: KJV ‘with throwing a stone’ and Geneva 1599 ‘by casting a stone’, and the Douay-Rheims flatly ‘If he throw a stone’. Reading it as SIZE: the NWT 1984 ‘a small stone’ and the TNM 1987 «una piedra pequeña» — both of which their own later revisions abandon, the 2013 reading ‘a stone that could cause death’ and the 2019 «una piedra con la que se puede matar».

⭐ And two versions read the size in OPPOSITE directions from the same word. Against the NWT 1984’s small stone, the Living Bible prints ‘struck down with a large stone’. One infers that yad limits the stone to what a hand can hold, so it must be small; the other infers that a stone which can kill must be big. Hand, throw, small, large: four answers, and the Hebrew word is one syllable.

Vv20-21 supply what a modern court would call the mental element, and they do it as a list of nouns rather than a definition: sin’ah (hatred), tzediyah (lying in wait), eivah (enmity). Vv22-23 will negate the same three, one by one, which is how the chapter defines an accident — not by describing it, but by removing every element of the crime and seeing what is left.

Numbers 35:22-25 — The accident defined by subtraction, a congregation that judges BETWEEN two parties rather than against one, and a release that waits on a death

An accident is not described here; it is arrived at by cancelling a crime. Vv22-23 take vv20-21 apart term by term: be-feta, suddenly, against v20’s deliberation; be-lo eivah, without enmity, cancelling v21; be-lo tzediyah, without lying in wait, cancelling v20; be-lo re’ot, not seeing him, which has no positive counterpart at all; and then two clauses that go past the act to the relationship — ‘he was not his enemy, and was not seeking his harm’. The law is not asking what happened. It is asking what the man wanted, and it answers by listing what he did not.

⚠⚠ V24’s court is a preposition. The congregation judges bein ha-makeh u-vein go’el ha-dam — BETWEEN the one who struck and the redeemer of blood. It is not a prosecution: both men are parties, the bereaved kinsman has a standing claim the court must weigh rather than a grievance it may dismiss, and the killer is not on one side of the room with the state on the other. ⚠ The whole shelf keeps the preposition — KJV ‘judge between the slayer and the revenger of blood’, ASV ‘between the smiter and the avenger of blood’ — which is worth saying because it is the sort of small word a paraphrase usually loses. ⚠ Twelve of the thirteen keep it, including the Douay-Rheims, which restructures the verse and still has the cause ‘debated between him that struck, and the’ kinsman. The one that loses it is exactly the one you would expect: the Living Bible drops the preposition and the two parties with it, turning a hearing into two yes-or-no questions — ‘then the people shall judge whether or not it was an accident, and whether or not to hand the killer over to the avenger’. The bereaved kinsman stops being a party with a claim and becomes a disposal option.

V25’s verb for what the court does is hitzilu, to snatch away, pull out of danger — the congregation RESCUES the killer ‘from the hand of’ the redeemer of blood. The court is physically interposing itself, not merely ruling. And what it does next is not release him: it RETURNS him to the city he had already run to. An acquittal on the murder charge is not an acquittal into freedom.

⚠⚠⚠ The sentence has no term. It ends when a third man dies. The killer stays ‘until the death of the high priest, who was anointed with the holy oil’ — and the chapter never explains the connection. It is the one clause here that behaves like ritual rather than law: a man’s confinement is measured by the lifespan of someone with no part in his case, who may die next year or in thirty. The anointing is mentioned specifically, which is the only hint the text gives, and this project does not vote on what it means. What can be said flatly is what the chapter puts side by side: the high priest is the man whose office is to make atonement (Leviticus 16, already on these pages), and eight verses later this chapter will say that for bloodshed there is no atonement except blood. The reader is left holding both sentences. Readings differ, and none is stated here.

Numbers 35:26-29 — Step past the boundary and the law that saved you stops: the one verse where the sixth commandment’s verb describes a killing the law permits, and no version prints it

⚠⚠ The refuge is a place, not a status, and the border is doing the same work it did one chapter ago. Numbers 34, already on these pages, is a chapter built out of gvul — the line that fixes a nation. Here the same noun draws a line around a single town, and crossing it costs a man his life. The deed and the postcode are made of one word.

⚠⚠⚠ And v27 is the sentence this chapter is worth reading for. The Hebrew is ve-ratzach go’el ha-dam et ha-rotzeach — the redeemer of blood RATZACHes the ROTZEACH: the same root, twice, in four words, one of them the act and one of them the man. And the clause that follows is ein lo dam, ‘there is no blood for him’ — no bloodguilt. So the verb of ‘You shall not murder’ is used, by the law itself, of a killing the law declares blameless.

⚠⚠ Not one version on either shelf repeats the word. Every one of the thirteen breaks the pair: KJV ‘the revenger of blood kill the slayer’; ASV ‘the avenger of blood slay the manslayer’; Geneva 1599 ‘slay the murderer’; NWT 1984 ‘does slay the manslayer’; RV60 «matare al homicida»; TNM 1987 «mata al homicida». Three go further and introduce the missing word only in order to deny it: the NIV has the avenger ‘kill the accused WITHOUT BEING GUILTY OF MURDER’, the Living Bible ‘kills him, IT IS NOT MURDER’, and the NVI «no será culpable de HOMICIDIO» — so both shelves do it, not just the English one. All three are fair statements of what the verse decides. Both are the exact opposite of the way it says it: the Hebrew uses the word and then withholds the guilt.

⚠ This is where a shipped entry in this project’s own dictionary was wrong, and this chapter is what corrects it. The ratzach entry has said since it was written that the verb ‘is not used of killing in war, of judicial execution, or of slaughtering animals’. Reading all forty-five occurrences, the war and the animals hold — but the judicial execution does not. It is used here at v27 of the redeemer’s sanctioned killing, and at v30 of the court’s own. The entry has been corrected rather than quietly narrowed, and the correction makes the better point: ratzach is not a moral verdict built into a verb. It is a word for the killing of a person, which this chapter then sorts.

⚠⚠ V29 closes the law on a phrase that stands in exactly two verses of the Hebrew Bible. Le-chuqqat mishpat, ‘for a statute of judgement’, occurs here and at Numbers 27:11, already on these pages and already carrying that exact rendering — the closing line of the law of Zelophehad’s daughters, where an inheritance passes to the nearest kinsman. The same book, the same formula, and the same relative: in chapter 27 he inherits from you, and in chapter 35 he hunts the man who killed you. The go’el is one office with both duties, and Numbers stamps both with one phrase.

Numbers 35:30-32 — Two witnesses, two ransoms refused — and the priest who loses his title in the middle of a sentence

⚠⚠ V30 does it again, and this time the court is the subject. Le-fi edim yirtzach et ha-rotzeach — ‘at the mouth of witnesses one shall KILL the KILLER’: an active verb, the sixth commandment’s verb, with no stated subject, describing a lawful execution. ⚠ The shelf splits three ways and not one of the thirteen keeps it active with the murder-word. Most go passive: KJV ‘the murderer shall be put to death by the mouth of witnesses’, ASV ‘shall be slain at the mouth of witnesses’, NIV ‘is to be put to death as a murderer’, NWT 1984 ‘should be slain as a murderer’. Both Reina-Valeras go INTRANSITIVE, so that nobody kills him at all — RV 1909 and RV60 alike «morirá el homicida», the murderer shall die. And Geneva 1599 alone invents a subject the Hebrew does not name: ‘the JUDGE shall slay the murderer, through witnesses’. The Douay-Rheims sidesteps the verb entirely — ‘The murderer shall be punished by witnesses’.

‘At the MOUTH of witnesses’ is le-fi edim, literally so, and the plural matters: one witness cannot convict. The chapter does not say two; it says not-one, which is the same rule Numbers 5’s own no-witness case exists outside of, and which Deuteronomy 19:15 (not yet on these pages) will fix at two or three.

⚠⚠⚠ Then two ransoms are refused in two verses, and the second is the surprising one. Kofer is the price paid to buy a life back. V31 forbids taking it for a murderer — expected, and morally legible: a rich man may not buy his way off a capital charge. V32 forbids taking it for the man who is innocent, to let him leave the refuge early. The accidental killer cannot buy his way home either. Whatever the confinement is, it is not a fine, and it is not a punishment that money could stand in for.

⚠⚠ And the atonement-root is standing in all three of these verses at once. Kofer (v31), kofer (v32), and then at v33 lo yekhuppar, ‘it shall not be atoned’ — the same three letters, k-p-r, and the only three verses in the chapter that carry them. Twice the chapter refuses a price, and the third time it names the only currency that is accepted. English cannot hold the pair together, since ‘ransom’ and ‘atonement’ share nothing; this project keeps both words and reports the root.

⚠⚠⚠ V32 is also where the high priest loses half his title, and most of the shelf gives it back. Vv25 and 28 both read ha-kohen ha-gadol, the great priest. V32 reads simply ha-kohen — THE PRIEST. Three of the thirteen keep the Hebrew’s bare noun: KJV and ASV alike ‘until the death of the priest’, and the RV 1909 «hasta que muera el sacerdote». The other ten supply the rank: NIV ‘the high priest’, Living Bible ‘the High Priest’, Geneva 1599 ‘the high Priest’, Douay-Rheims ‘the high priest’, the NWT 1984 ‘the death of the high priest’ and its 2013 revision the same, the TNM 1987 «del sumo sacerdote» and its 2019 revision likewise, and the NVI «del sumo sacerdote». ⚠⚠ The RV60 is the one worth stopping on, because it is a revision moving AWAY from its own predecessor: where the RV 1909 printed the bare «el sacerdote», the 1960 reads «el sumo sacerdote». ⚠ Whether the shorter form is an abbreviation, a different draft, or simply the writer not repeating himself a third time, the text does not say — but a reader of ten of these thirteen versions cannot know the question exists.

Numbers 35:33-34 — Blood corrupts the LAND, in a verb that stands in exactly two verses of the Bible — and the reason given is that God lives there

⚠⚠⚠ The chapter’s last argument is not about justice. It is about contamination. Everything to this point has been procedure: who is a killer, who may kill him, who decides. V33 changes register completely and says why any of it matters — unavenged blood does something to the ground. Ve-lo tachanifu et ha-aretz: you shall not corrupt the land, ‘for blood — it corrupts the land’.

⚠⚠ That verb is nearly unique. The root ch-n-f is ordinary enough as an adjective — the godless, the profane man, all over Job and Isaiah — but the CAUSATIVE, making something else godless, occurs almost nowhere. Searched consonantally, the exact form yachanif stands in two verses of the whole Hebrew Bible: this one, and Daniel 11:32, already on these pages, where a king ‘shall CORRUPT with smooth words’ those who act wickedly against the covenant. Two occurrences, and they take different objects: in Daniel a man corrupts people, here blood corrupts a country. This translation prints the same English verb in both places so a reader can see it is the same word.

⚠⚠ And the shelf mostly reaches for a different metaphor. The KJV and Geneva 1599 use both words in one verse — ‘ye shall not pollute the land… for blood it defileth the land’ — while the ASV and the NIV keep one verb for both halves, ‘pollute’ and ‘polluteth’, ‘pollute’ and ‘pollutes’, which is closer to what the Hebrew does; the NWT 1984 likewise ‘pollute’; the Spanish shelf mostly «contaminar», with the TNM 1987 alone printing «corromper», corrupt — which its own 2019 revision then drops back to «contaminar». Pollution is a fair rendering of the effect; it is not what the root says, which is that the land is made GODLESS. ⚠ The Douay-Rheims adds a word the Hebrew has not got — ‘the land of your habitation, which is stained with the blood of THE INNOCENT’ — narrowing a rule the Hebrew leaves general, and the Living Bible substitutes the crime for the substance throughout, reading ‘murder pollutes the land’ where the Hebrew has blood, and resolving the last clause to ‘no atonement can be made for murder except by the execution of the murderer’.

⚠⚠ The idea is not new here, and both of its earlier statements are already on these pages. At Genesis 4:10-11 the first murder produces a voice: ‘the voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground’, and Cain is cursed FROM the ground ‘which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood’. At Genesis 9:6, after the flood, the rule is stated as law for the first time: ‘Whoever sheds human blood, by humans his blood will be shed; for in the image of God he made humankind’. Numbers 35:33 is the third statement and the most physical of the three — the ground is not a witness now, and not a plaintiff; it is the thing being damaged.

⚠⚠⚠ And the reason the chapter finally gives is a tenancy. V34: do not defile the land ‘in which you dwell, in the midst of which I dwell; for I, Jehovah, dwell in the midst of the children of Israel’. The verb is shakhen, to settle, to tent — the root behind mishkan, the tabernacle this people has been carrying since Exodus. The argument is not that murder offends a moral law in the abstract. It is that the landlord lives on the property. ⚠ The clause is repeated twice in one verse, once of Israel and once of God, with the same verb both times. Twelve of the thirteen keep the doubling — even the Douay-Rheims, which rewrites the first half entirely, still lands on ‘I am the Lord that dwell among the children of’ Israel. The Living Bible is the one that trims, collapsing both to a single ‘for I, Jehovah, will be living there’ — and with them the point, which is that the same verb is true of the tenant and the landlord at once.

Which is where the chapter ends, and where the book nearly does. Numbers has one chapter left; and this one has spent thirty-four verses arguing that a land is not merely territory. Numbers 34 drew its borders as a deed. This chapter says what happens inside them when someone is killed, and answers with a word for corruption and a word for a tent.