Today, I am reading and commenting on  Numbers 34-36.

Today’s passage contains the provision for the establishment of cities of refuge in Israel once the Israelites conquer the land God had promised to their ancestors.  When we talk about this we often pay limited attention to what it says and think that cities of refuge were a place for anyone who killed another person to flee to avoid being killed in revenge.  However, if we read closely we discover that the cities of refuge were only for people who accidentally killed someone else…and accidentally is defined to exclude circumstances where you should have known there was a significant risk of killing them.  So, if you hit someone with a deadly weapon intending to hurt them, even if you did not mean to kill them, the cities of refuge would not be a refuge.  This passage called for you to be put to death.  Which means that if you accidentally killed someone you could flee to a city of refuge and stay there until the high priest died, or you could stay where you were and risk being killed by your victim’s nearest relative.  In either case, you paid a pretty steep price for taking someone’s life, even though it was completely an accident.  The message here is that every human life is valuable and there is a price to be paid for taking it, even if we didn’t mean to do so.  Take care of where you throw that dangerous object.  Pay attention to what is downrange when you are taking target practice.  Know what’s below when you drop a heavy object off of a building, or other high place.  Otherwise, you may have to pay a heavy price.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.