You shall prepare the way, and divide the borders of your land which Yahweh your God causes you to inherit into three parts, that every man slayer may flee there.
To designate six cities of refuge for those who kill unintentionally
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
תָּכִין לְךָ הַדֶּרֶךְ וְשִׁלַּשְׁתָּ אֶת־גְּבוּל אַרְצְךָ אֲשֶׁר יַנְחִילְךָ יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ וְהָיָה לָנוּס שָׁמָּה כָּל־רֹצֵחַ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להכין שש ערי מקלט כדי שיהיו מוכנות למכה נפש בשגגה, ושיתקן דרך אליהם ויישירו אותם, ולא יעזבו שימנע הבורח לרוץ. והוא אמרו יתעלה תכין לך הדרך. וכבר התבארו דיני מצוה זו בסנהדרין ומכות ושקלים וסוטה. וכבר זכרנו (מצוה קע"ו) אמרם ערי מקלט אין נוהגות אלא בארץ. (שם שם):
That is that He commanded us to prepare six cities of refuge, such that they be ready for the accidental manslaughterer, that a path to them be fixed, that it be straightened and that nothing be left that would impede the fugitive from running [to them]. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "You shall prepare the path" (Deuteronomy 19:3). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Sanhedrin, Makkot, Shekalim and Sotah. And we have already mentioned (Sefer HaMitzvot, Positive Commandment 176) their saying [that the laws of these cities] are only practiced in the Land [of Israel] (See Parashat Shoftim; Mishneh Torah, Murderer and the Preservation of Life 8.)
Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.
Literary form: a flat, unconditional command
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Binding in the land of Israel
Classical halakhic consequences
The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.
Imposed by a court
No court-imposed penalty is recorded.
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
No ritual remedy is recorded.
How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment
The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.
- Orthodox Binding, with modification
- Conservative Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Binding, with modification
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
How later traditions received this commandment
How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 11QTemple (11Q19) LXIV-LXV reinterpreted it
Rabbinic aggadah
- Bamidbar Rabbah 23:13 expanded it homiletically
- Makkot 11a (aggadah: the high priest's mother provisions the exiles so they will not pray for his death) expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Fuga et Inventione 86-118 read it allegorically
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.123-136 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.172-173 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Hebrews 6:18 The catalog describes this reception as: echoed 'fled for refuge' (katapheugō) imagery conjecturally drawing on the refuge-city motif applied to eschatological hope; the refuge-city connection is interpretive inference, not explicit in the text
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- hittite laws homicide provisions distinguishing circumstances of killing with compensation rather than blood-vengeance Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§1-6 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks
One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.
This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.