1When Yahweh your God cuts off the nations whose land Yahweh your God is giving you, and you dispossess them and settle in their cities and in their houses,
2you shall set apart for yourself three cities in the midst of your land that Yahweh your God is giving you to possess.
3You shall prepare the way for yourself and divide into three parts the territory of your land that Yahweh your God gives you to inherit, so that any manslayer may flee there.
4And this is the case of the manslayer who may flee there and live: whoever strikes his neighbor without knowledge, when he did not hate him previously—
5as when a man goes into the forest with his neighbor to cut wood, and his hand swings the axe to cut down the tree, and the iron head slips off the wood and finds his neighbor and he dies—he may flee to one of these cities and live.
6Otherwise the avenger of blood might pursue the manslayer while his heart is hot, and overtake him because the way is long, and strike him down mortally—though he did not deserve a death sentence, since he had not hated him previously.
7Therefore I command you, saying: Three cities you shall set apart for yourself.
8And if Yahweh your God enlarges your territory, as he swore to your fathers, and gives you all the land that he promised to give to your fathers—
9if you keep all this commandment to do it, which I command you today, to love Yahweh your God and to walk in his ways all the days—then you shall add for yourself three more cities to these three,
10so that innocent blood is not shed in the midst of your land that Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, and bloodguilt be upon you.
11But if a man hates his neighbor and lies in wait for him and rises against him and strikes him down mortally so that he dies, and then flees to one of these cities,
12then the elders of his city shall send and take him from there, and hand him over to the avenger of blood, and he shall die.
13Your eye shall not pity him. You shall purge the blood of the innocent from Israel, and it will go well with you.
14You shall not move back your neighbor’s boundary marker, which the ancestors set, in your inheritance that you inherit in the land that Yahweh your God is giving you to possess.
15A single witness shall not stand against a man for any iniquity or for any sin, in any offense that he commits; by the mouth of two witnesses or by the mouth of three witnesses shall a matter be established.
16If a malicious witness stands against a man to testify against him falsely,
17then the two men who have the dispute shall stand before Yahweh, before the priests and the judges who are in office in those days.
18And the judges shall investigate thoroughly, and if the witness is a false witness—he has testified falsely against his brother—
19then you shall do to him as he schemed to do to his brother, and you shall purge the evil from your midst.
20And those who remain shall hear and fear, and they shall not again do such an evil thing as this in your midst.
21Your eye shall not pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
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