XXI. (120) The sacred law says that the man, who has been killed without any intention that he should be so on the part of him who killed him, has been given up by God into the hands of his slayers; {8}{#ex 21:13.} in this way designing to make an excuse for the man who appears to have slain him as if he had slain a guilty person. (121) For the merciful and forgiving God can never be supposed to have given up any innocent person to be put to death; but whoever ingeniously escapes the judgment of a human tribunal by means of his own cunning and wariness, he is convicted when brought before the invisible tribunal of nature, by which alone the uncorrupted truth is discerned without being kept in the dark by the artifices of sophistical arguments. For such an investigation does not admit of arguments at all, laying bare all devices and intentions, and bringing the most secret counsels to light; and, in one sense, it does not look upon a man who has slain another as liable to justice, inasmuch as he has only sinned to be the minister of a divine judgment, but still he will have incurred an obscure and slight kind of defilement, which, however, may obtain allowance and pardon. (122) For God employs those who commit slight and remedial errors against those who have perpetrated enormous and unpardonable crimes as ministers of punishment; not, indeed, that he approves of them, but that he avails himself of them as suitable instruments of punishment, so that no one who is himself pure in his whole life and descended from virtuous parents may have homicide imputed to him, even if he be the greatest man in the world. (123) Therefore, the law has pronounced the sentence of banishment upon him who has slain a man, yet not of banishment any where, nor for ever; for it has assigned six cities, {9}{#nu 35:1.} one fourth portion of what the whole sacred tribe received as its inheritance, for those who were convicted of homicide; which, from the circumstances connected with them, it has named cities of refuge. And it fixed the time of this banishment as the length of the life of the high priest, permitting the exiles to return home after his death.
XXII. (124) And the cause of the first of these injunctions was this. The tribe which has been mentioned received these cities as a reward for a justifiable and holy slaughter, which we must look upon as the most illustrious and important of all the gallant actions that were ever performed. (125) For when the prophet, after having been called up to the loftiest and most sacred of all the mountains in that district, was divinely instructed in the generic outlines of all the special laws, {10}{#ex 32:1.} and was out of sight of his people for many days; those of the people who were not of a peaceable disposition filled every place with the evils which arise from anarchy, and crowned all their iniquity with open impiety, turning into ridicule all those excellent and beautiful lessons concerning the honour due to the one true and living God, and having made a golden bull, an imitation of the Egyptian Typhos, and brought to it unholy sacrifices, and festivals unhallowed, and instituted profane and impious dances, with songs and hymns instead of lamentations; (126) then the tribe aforesaid, being very terribly indignant at their sudden departure from their previous customs, and being enflamed with zeal by reason of their natural disposition which hated iniquity, all became full of rage and of divine enthusiasm, and arming themselves, as at one signal, and with great contempt and one unanimous attack, came upon the people, drunk thus with a twofold intoxication of impiety and of wine, beginning with their nearest and dearest friends and relations, thinking those who loved God to be their only relations and friends. And in a very small portion of the day, four-and-twenty thousand men were slain; the calamities of whom were a warning to those who would otherwise have joined themselves to their iniquity, but who now were alarmed lest they should suffer a similar fate. (127) Since then these men had undertaken this expedition of their own accord and spontaneously, in the cause of piety and holy reverence for the one true and living God, not without great danger to those who had entered in the contest, the Father of the universe received them with approbation, and at once pronounced those who had slain those men to be pure from all curse and pollution, and in requital for their courage he bestowed the priesthood on them.
Page 12345678910111213141516171819202122
