"But if he thrust him suddenly without enmity, or have cast upon him
anything without laying of wait,
"Or with any stone, wherewith a man may die, seeing him not, and cast it
upon him, that he die, and was not his enemy, neither sought his harm:
"Then the congregation shall judge between the slayer and the revenger of
blood according to these judgments:
"And the congregation shall deliver the slayer out of the hand of the
revenger of blood, and the congregation shall restore him to the city of
his refuge, whither he was fled."... [Footnote: Numbers XXXV, 15, 20-25.]
Here we have a defendant in a case of homicide setting up the defence that
the killing happened through an accident, but an accident not caused by
criminal negligence, and this defence is to be tried by the congregation,
which is tantamount to trial by jury. It is not left to God, under the
oversight of the Church; and this is precisely our own system at the
present day. We now come to the inferences to be drawn from these facts.
Supposing that the Israelites when they migrated to Egypt, in the time of
Joseph, were in the condition of pure nomads among whom the blood feud was
fully recognized as law, an interval of four or five hundred years, such
as they are supposed to have passed in Goshen would bring them to the
exodus. Now, assuming that the Israelites during those four centuries,
when they lived among civilized neighbors and under civilized law, made an
intellectual movement corresponding in velocity to the movement the
English made after the conquest, they would have been, about the time when
the cities of refuge were created, in the position described in Numbers,
which is what we should expect assuming the Biblical tradition to be true.
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