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Joshua 20 · a question people ask

Could a murderer hide in a city of refuge?

In the text

Not by the law. This chapter speaks only of one who "kills any person accidentally or unintentionally" (20:3), who "struck his neighbor unintentionally, and didn’t hate him before" (20:5). Even he declares his case at the gate (20:4) and must still stand "before the congregation for judgment" (20:6). The earlier laws say what happened to the other kind of killer, and this chapter doesn't repeat them. Numbers 35 gives the cases in which "he is a murderer. The murderer shall surely be put to death" (Numbers 35:16). Deuteronomy says that if a man who hated his neighbor killed him and fled to one of these cities, "the elders of his city shall send and bring him there, and deliver him into the hand of the avenger of blood" (Deuteronomy 19:12). Who decided which kind of killer he was is Deuteronomy 19's honest question.

The verses

“But if any man hates his neighbor, lies in wait for him, rises up against him, strikes him mortally so that he dies, and he flees into one of these cities; then the elders of his city shall send and bring him there, and deliver him into the hand of the avenger of blood, that he may die.”
Deuteronomy 19:11-12 · World English Bible

From Favor's study of Joshua 20

Joshua 20: The cities of refuge, named

Joshua 20 puts in place what the LORD "spoke to you by Moses" (20:2): six cities, three in the land set apart with the verb of holiness (20:7) and three beyond the Jordan (20:8), where one who killed "unintentionally" told his case to the elders at the gate and was taken in (20:4-5). They were for all Israel "and for the alien who lives among them" (20:9).

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Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. Every answer cites the verses it rests on. What we believe · All Bible questions