Week 8 Deuteronomy
There’s a pretty natural tendency to accelerate to highway speed zipping through the law-heavy middle section of Deuteronomy. So it would be easy to breeze by a rule that took time to explain what-to-do if someone found an unidentified corpse in a field outside of town. The ruling was that the local people had to make an animal sacrifice. You wonder what’s going on because even though the townspeople had absolutely nothing to do with the death of this dead stranger, they would still lose the sacrificed animal. But Moses explained it this way: by following these instructions and doing what is right in the Lord’s sight, you will cleanse the guilt of murder from your community
I think this paragraph registered with me was because last week I was reading about the Cities of Refuge and about how first-degree murder and manslaughter cases had to be treated. Moses explained the reason these murder laws were to be enforced: this will ensure that the land where you live will not be polluted, for murder pollutes the land.
An unsolved violent death isn’t just lost to memory, doesn’t just disappear. It has an adhesive & clingy quality. The guilt hangs around likes a toxic pollutant that dirties up the land and the community.
So a sacrifice has to be made when a murdered stranger is found out on the range because only death adequately hygienizes the land.
Note: quotes from Deuteronomy 21:9 & Numbers 35:33 (NLT)