Deuteronomy 21 - Introduction

Of the Expiation of an Untraced Murder

If a slain man be found in the open country and his slayer is not known the elders of the nearest town shall take a heifer not yet wrought with to an uncultivated valley with a stream and break its neck (Deuteronomy 21:1-4); and priests shall attend (Deuteronomy 21:5); and the elders, washing their hands over the heifer, shall testify that they neither shed this blood nor saw it shed, and pray for forgiveness, and the blood shall be forgiven and the guilt removed (Deuteronomy 21:6-9). Peculiar to D, it opens and closes in the Sg. address and with D's formulas (Deuteronomy 21:1; Deuteronomy 21:8); the latter also appear with the entrance of the priests (Deuteronomy 21:5). The rest has no trace of the direct address (except in the doubtful 3 a) nor of D's formulas. Note, too, in the opening of Deuteronomy 21:9, how emphatically the return to the direct address is made by a variation and thouof the formula with which D closes similar laws; as if he felt some such junction were needed between what he had been quoting and his own addition. All this suggests that D has incorporated, and rounded off, an older law or custom; and the suggestion is confirmed by the primitive character of that custom, the fact that it implies sacrifice (see on 3 f.) which, according to D, is valid only at the One Altar, and that the earlier authorities in Israel, the elders, perform this. That the law is found only in D points to its having been a local practice. That he altered any of the original details cannot be positively affirmed; but it is noteworthy that while the definition of the heifer and the place of its killing imply a sacrifice, and the running water may be held to mean that originally the animal's blood was shed into it, there is now in the law no mention of its blood, but its neck is to be broken, as if it were not a regular sacrifice.

It is possible that Deuteronomy 21:2, with its reference to the judges,belongs not to the law quoted but to D; and very probable that both the eldersin that v. and the whole of Deuteronomy 21:5 are additions later than D. Steuern. assigns the bulk of the passage to the code of his Pl. author on the ground that eldersare also mentioned in other passages which he assigns to that, e.g. Deuteronomy 19:11 f., and that his Sg. author does not know of the elders.

The principle of this law, that an untraced murder must be ritually expiated, and the associated principle that the community in which it happened are responsible till expiation has been offered, prevailed among the Semites as well as with other peoples. Ḫammurabi enjoins (§ 23) that if a highwayman has not been caught the man robbed shall swear what he has lost, and have this restored by the governor of the district in which the robbery took place; and (§ 24) that if a life has been lost the city or district governor shall pay 1 mina of silver to the deceased's relatives. W. R. Smith points out that in Arabia when a man was found slain the people of the place had to swear they were not the murderers (Kinship and Marriage, etc., 263) and that in the Kitâb el-Aghaniix. 178, l. 25 ff. the responsibility for a homicide is thrown on the nearest homestead, dar(MS note quoted by Driver). Cp. Doughty Ar. Des., i. 176. I add a modern instance of communal responsibility which resembles the case in § 23 of Ḫammurabi's Code. In 1901 when encamped at Banias, although we had the usual watchman given us by the village, one of our horses was stolen by night. The dragoman, without telling me, appealed to two soldiers from the garrison of Mejdel esh-Shems who were passing. They summoned to our camp the elders of the village who denied on oath that they had been guilty of the crime or knew the criminal. They were very respectable looking ancients and our Western instincts of justice were wounded by the proposal that the whole gang of them should at once be marched off -elbow-tight" to the prison at Mejdel. They offered a substitute for the stolen horse, but when this arrived it proved to be a very inferior animal, and was refused. After 24 hours the missing beast was produced, and we went our way uncertain whether it had been stolen with the connivance of the elders or not; but thankful for the institution of communal responsibility. Cp. Baldensperger, PEFQ, 1906, 14.