Levitical Cities

And yet, there were special cities even among all these other cities. They’re described in Joshua 20 and 21. Chapter 21 tells about the towns that were given to the Levites. The Levites, the priests, didn’t have any land of their own; they were not given a tribal territory. Instead, God scattered the priests throughout Israel as a blessing to the whole people. And they were given these priestly cities in which they lived. There were 48 of them, and chapter 21 lists them. And then at the very end, there’s a summation, which says, “The towns of the Levites and the territory held by the Israelites were 48 in all, together with their pasture lands.”

This is where these cities of refuge came in. God appointed in the law that these six cities should be set up throughout the land, equally spaced, so whenever anything like this happened, a person who had unintentionally and accidentally killed another person would have a place to flee to. As soon as the accident happened, this man would get to one of these cities as fast as he could and upon arrival, stand in the gate. He was to present his case to the elders of the city, who were the Levitical priests, and explain what had happened. It says explicitly in these texts that if his case is just, they were to hear it. It was not a device by which a murderer could escape justice; but if his cause was just, if this really was an accidental killing, then they were not to turn him away.