Verse Nu35-25a states
And the congregation shall deliver the
negligent murderer from the hand of the avenger of blood, and the congregation shall restore him to his city of refuge, where he had fled; and he shall live there
until the death of the high priest, who was anointed with the holy oil.
Rashi comments on the connection between the underlined
phrase connecting the death of the high priest
to the release of the
negligent murderer from the prison city
of refuge:A primary task of the Priest is to atone for inadvertency. For example a person who negligently
descecrates the Sabbath receives atonement by bringing
a sin offering and attending to the procedures performed
by the priest. If the priests had done their job
perfectly there would be no negligent murders.
Consequently when the High Priest dies (
as a punishment for lack
of prevention of negligence) the negligent murderer
goes free.
We think the above Rashi perfectly clear. We
further add that the general rules governing
sybolism may be found in my article
Genesis 1 speaks about the creation of Prophecy
not the Creation of the world which can be found
on the world wide web at
http://www.RashiYomi.com/gen-1.htm
.
- In that article we have explained that there
is an obligation to interpret a commandment
as symbolic when the Bible relates two items
that are superficially unrelated. A typical example
occurs in our salute to a flag. A flag by itself
is an item totally unrelated to the country we
live in. Therefore our salute to the flag is seen
as a symbolic gesture affirming our affiliation
to our country.
- We have
also explained in the above article that when we are
obligated to interpret a commandment symbolically
we do so by using the function, form, linguistic
expressions of the item. Hence in the example
today we interpret the Priest in terms of his
function -- to prevent negligence.
We should explain why the death of the priest
releases the prisoner. Prior to the death of the
priest the blood-avenger blaimed the murder on the
murderer's negligence. The blood-avenger
may wish to
avenge the murder by killing the murderer. However
when the High Priest dies a message is sent to the
blood avenger: Perhaps the murder is not the
murderer's fault. Perhaps it is the priest's fault.
If the priests had been more diligent in their
prevention of negligence then the murder would not
have happened.Since you are not certain whether
the negligent murder was the fault of the priest
or the murderer you shouldn't want to kill the
murderer.
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