At the end of this chapter, God tells the people not to defile the land. The way in which this has been discussed in this chapter is the shedding of innocent blood. The only atonement is the death of the murderer, and I might add, only the murderer. There is no allowance for revenge or taking more than that. The idea in the world that if you killed my brother, I'll kill all of yours is absolutely forbidden. There is also no way to keep from defiling the land without taking the life of the murderer. There is something that will go wrong in a country where those who take life go free and those who seek vengeance. It's something to think about.
Before someone thinks that this would make getting convictions easy in the Old Testament and capital punishment would be handed out easily, remember that you could not convict someone to death on the testimony of one person. However, a person who has accidentally killed someone (or there was only one witness) had to stay in the city of refuge until the death of the high priest. So there was still a price.
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
No comments:
Post a Comment