1 Then the Lord told Joshua 2 to tell the Israelites to “Assign the towns of refuge of which I spoke to you by Moses, 3 so that anyone who kills another person by mistake, by accident, may run into one of them. They will serve as a refuge from the vengeance of the dead person’s next of kin. 4 The killer will flee to one of these towns and stand at the entry of the town gate, telling their case to the elders of that town. The elders must let the killer have a place to stay among them, 5 and if the next of kin comes in pursuit, they must not hand the killer over, because they killed their neighbour by accident, having had no feud with them previously. 6 The killer must stay in that town until they appear before the community for trial, and then until the death of the then high priest. After that the killer may return to their own town and their own home, from which they ran away.”

7 So they consecrated Kedesh in Galilee, in the highlands of Naphtali, Shechem in the highlands of Ephraim, and Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron) in the highlands of Judah. 8 On the eastern side of the Jordan they assigned Bezer in the desert, on the tableland belonging to the tribe of Reuben, Ramoth in Gilead from the tribe of Gad, and Golan in Bashan from the tribe of Manasseh. 9 These were the fixed towns for all the Israelites and also for any foreigners resident among them, so that anyone who killed a person by mistake might flee there and not die by the avenging hand of the dead person’s next of kin, until they appeared before the community.