Avenger of Blood

            The notion of the avenger of blood is apparently ancient.  The difficulty is that the term is literally, go’el, which seems to mean at its root “next of kin.”  Apparently, the next of kin had various responsibilities, one of which included avenging the unjust death of a family member.  Admittedly, I didn’t look high and low, but I couldn’t find a place where the Lord commanded that the go’el be an avenger of blood.  It seems to me, then, that the notion of the avenger of blood is one of those things that was in the culture around Israel (like polygamy) and that the Lord was taking steps to limit the effects of the practice by establishing a means by which an unintentional killer could escape the cycle of vendetta that plagued the ancient world.

            Aside:  one of my favorite Doonesbury cartoons is from the time of the Iraq war.  It goes something like this.  An American officer is scouting an insurgent location with an Iraqi chieftain.  The Iraqi says to the American, “I can’t promise to bring him in alive.  He murdered a member of my family, and I am duty-bound to avenge him.”  The American asks, “When did this happen?”  The Iraqi says, “1387.”  Clearly vendetta needs to have some limits placed on it!  (Wait a sec; here’s a link:  http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2008/01/13/).

            Anyhow, what we have in the assignment of cities of refuge is one more attempt to make Israel less like the nations around her and more like the Lord who has chosen her.  Notice, too, that 5 of the 6 cities of refuge are also Levitical cities.  It’s just possible that the Levites, as the caretakers of the tabernacle and the teachers of Israel, were also supposed to more fully reflect the mercy of the Lord in their civic arrangements.