וַאֲשֶׁר֙ לֹ֣א צָדָ֔ה וְהָאֱלֹהִ֖ים אִנָּ֣ה לְיָד֑וֹ וְשַׂמְתִּ֤י לְךָ֙ מָק֔וֹם אֲשֶׁ֥ר יָנ֖וּס שָֽׁמָּה׃
If it was not by design—it came about by an act of God—I will assign you a place to which that person can flee.*
*a place to which that person can flee The case of a female culprit may have been more complex.
(The above rendering and its footnote come from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation.)
The first instance of the particle אֲשֶׁר—which is not intrinsically gendered in its reference (Isa 44:7)—here functions like a pronoun, introducing a clause of condition that becomes the subject of the sentence. The reference is nonspecific. The co-referential masculine Hebrew verbal inflections likewise refer to a category of persons. This means that the referent’s gender is not solely female but is otherwise unconstrained by the wording.
Regarding the manslaughter situation in question, the experts whom I consulted circa 2004 (Phyllis Bird, Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, Adele Berlin, and Jacob Milgrom) were unanimous that an ancient Israelite audience—given their view of gender roles—would have understood from the very idea of “a place to which [the killer] can flee” that (in contrast to the previous verse) the subject here is exclusively male. If so, then for cultural reasons, the text’s original audience had warrant to believe that the text’s composer meant to exclude women from this situation.
I myself did not find this argument entirely convincing. Nor did the academic consulting editor for the RJPS project, Hilary Lipka. She found that Jonathan Burnside, in “Exodus and Asylum: Uncovering the Relationship between Biblical Law and Narrative,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 34.3 (2010): 243–66, seems to assume that both men and women could utilize the biblical cities of refuge (264). Burnside also asserts that in the ancient Near East, there was the general idea that both men and women could seek asylum in a variety of circumstances (giving as examples “runaway slaves and artisans, runaway military and civilian captives of war, deserting soldiers and indebted peasants, to name but a few,” 263), citing the work of Amnon Altman.
Nor did Job Jindo, who was revising translator for the RJPS adaptation of the “city of refuge” passage in Joshua 20. In his analysis, he took into account two factors that others did not seem to have considered:
- the institution of asylum cities elsewhere in the ancient Near East (and in Greece), and
- the biblical concern about the defilement of land by innocent blood.
He explains as follows (and I quote):
The institution of asylum and refuge in the holy city is found throughout the ancient Near East and also Greece. Nippur, Sippar, and Babylon were designated as a place of asylum, granting protection to all who entered. One of the Assyrian documents reads: “Since Babylon is the center of the land . . . all who enter it, that person’s protection is assured . . . even a dog entering the city shall not be killed.” Herodotus also notes that the temple of Apollo at Didyma in Asia Minor was regarded as a place of asylum (I, 158–160). For more on these parallel examples, see Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel (1995), chapter 5. There is no indication in these texts that women were not in view (indeed, it would be a bit strange, if a dog was allowed to escape to the city and a woman couldn’t). What underlies this institution is the notion that one who is in the presence of a deity is under that deity’s protection, and there is no reason to assume that men alone could have received that protection.
The biblical institution of asylum cities derives not only from the attempt to prevent the vicious cycle of violence and vengeance but also from the concern about YHWH’s land getting contaminated by innocent blood (Num 35:33–34)—including the blood of an unintentional murderer. What underlies this category is the notion that spilling innocent blood can upset “what we might call a ‘natural balance’” (Baruch Levine, Numbers 21–36 [Anchor Bible; 2000], 562). In this respect, there is no indication in the Bible that the blood of men and the blood of women are recognized as qualitatively different. As the duty to take revenge did not take into account the gender of the culprit, it seems more logical to assume that homicidal women were also able to take refuge in the designated place.
On balance, the RJPS team decided that there was no warrant for gendered renderings of the biblical laws of asylum cities.
Granted that it probably went without saying that a manslayer who was a woman (and arguably anyone who was a dependent within a household, regardless of gender) would likely have faced some additional complications while leaving home and settling in a city of refuge. Like all ancient Near Eastern law collections, the Tanakh (here and in Num 35; Deut 4:41–43; 19:1–21; Josh 20:1–8) was not trying to be comprehensive but rather illustrative. Thus a new footnote cautions that a gender-neutral rendering does not necessarily imply that both men and women were treated in precisely the same manner.
With regard to translation, the NJPS rendering “he” is nowadays construed as a masculine-only reference. The sentence has been recast in gender-neutral terms.