Shoftim: The Body at the End of the Parashah*

If, in the land that your God יהוה is assigning you to possess, someone slain is found lying in the open, the identity of the slayer not being known, your elders and magistrates shall go out and measure the distances from the corpse to the nearby towns. The elders of the town nearest to the corpse shall then take a heifer which has never been worked, which has never pulled in a yoke; and the elders of that town shall bring the heifer down to an everflowing wadi, which is not tilled or sown. There, in the wadi, they shall break the heifer’s neck. The priests, sons of Levi, shall come forward; for your God יהוה has chosen them for divine service and to pronounce blessing in the name of יהוה, and every lawsuit and case of assault is subject to their ruling. Then all the elders of the town nearest to the corpse shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the wadi. And they shall make this declaration: “Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done. Absolve, יהוה, Your people Israel whom You redeemed, and do not let guilt for the blood of the innocent remain among Your people Israel.” And they will be absolved of bloodguilt. Thus you will remove from your midst guilt for the blood of the innocent, for you will be doing what is right in the sight of יהוה.

ידינו לא שפכה [AND THEY SHALL ANSWER AND SAY,] OUR HANDS HAVE NOT SHED [THIS BLOOD] — But would it enter anyone’s mind that the elders of the court are suspect of blood-shedding?! But the meaning of the declaration is: We never saw him and knowingly let him depart without food or escort (if we had seen him we would not have let him depart without these) (Sifrei Devarim 210:2; Sotah 45b). The priests thereupon say (next verse): כפר לעמך ישראל FORGIVE UNTO THY PEOPLE ISRAEL.

ומדדו, ”they (the authorities) will measure;” even if it clear how far he is removed from the nearest habitation, the act of performing the measuring will draw the attention of the public to what has happened in their vicinity; the people of the neighbouring towns or villages will institute searches for any resident not accounted for so that the identity of the slain person may be established. If someone in the neighbouring towns has not been accounted for, the family members will come to inspect the carcass to determine if he was related to them. Through these searches it may be determined who might have kept company with the slain man, and if there was a woman in the vicinity whose husband had disappeared and who was therefore an agunah, an abandoned woman unable to remarry until proof would forthcoming that her husband had died, and who could be able to remarry once the identity of the slain main was determined as having been her husband.

כפר לעמך, Please Lord, grant atonement to Your people, on behalf of the one who has spilled the blood. This is a veiled request to bring the murderer to justice as it is not given to man to do this. Compare Ketuvot 30 “if someone is guilty of judicial execution (and human justice did not reach him) he will either be killed by the secular authorities (for something else he is accused of) or terrorists will attack him.” ונכפר להם הדם, it will be atoned through heavenly judgment, the heavenly agent spilling the murderer’s blood accomplishing this. It will appear in the eyes of man as if the matter had taken care of itself independently. [one cannot pinpoint why the party concerned died a violent death, not knowing what he had been guilty of. Ed.]
ואתה תבער, when you are aware of someone’s guilt it is up to you to sentence the party and to carry out the sentence and not to rely on heaven to intervene. When you are unaware of the identity of the guilty party, and you have made exhaustive attempts to find him without success, you may rest assured that G’d Himself will take care of the problem.

ידינו לא שפכה את הדם הזה, “our hands have not spilled this blood;” it is unusual for the last letter in the word שפכה to be the letter ה instead of the appropriate letter ו, for the plural ending plural. According to our sages, a host is duty bound to provide his guest with five amenities: food, drink, accompany him a short distance when he leaves, provide with a bed for the night if he wishes to stay for the night, and to give him an ever so minimal gift on his departure. The letter ה would therefore be a veiled reference to that law. You may well ask if the Torah really thought that the priests and elders who lived many kilometers distant from where this murder occurred, had really been suspected of having had a hand in this foul deed; why should they need to have to declare that they were innocent of this crime? Rashi explains that the declaration by the elders and priests refers to the murdered person not having been seen by any of them and having been denied anything he had asked for. The Rabbis felt also that possibly the murdered person, after having been denied his needs in the last city he visited, turned to the first person whom he encountered who had some food on him and snatched it, as a result of which a fight developed during which he was killed. He may even have acted in selfdefense, and have become a victim.

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi says: One who walks along the way without having someone to accompany him should occupy himself with words of Torah, as it is stated with regard to words of Torah: “For they shall be a chaplet of grace to your head, and chains around your neck” (Proverbs 1:9). And Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi further says: Due to four steps that Pharaoh accompanied Abraham, as it is stated: “And Pharaoh gave men charge concerning him, and they brought him on the way, and his wife, and all that he had” (Genesis 12:20), Pharaoh enslaved Abraham’s descendants for four hundred years, as it is stated: “And shall serve them, and they shall afflict them four hundred years” (Genesis 15:13). Rav Yehuda says that Rav says: Anyone who accompanies his friend four cubits in a city will come to no harm by accompanying him. The Gemara relates: Ravina accompanied Rava bar Yitzḥak four cubits in a city. He came close to harm, but he was saved.The Sages taught: A teacher accompanies a student until the outskirts of the city; a friend accompanies a friend until the Shabbat boundary of that city, which is two thousand cubits; and for a student who accompanies his teacher, there is no measure to the distance he accompanies him. The Gemara asks: And how far? The student is certainly not required to walk with him the entire way. Rav Sheshet says: Up to a parasang [parsa], which is four mil. The Gemara comments: And we said this amount only with regard to one who is not his most significant teacher, but he accompanies his most significant teacher, who taught him most of his knowledge, three parasangs.