The concept of a blood avenger in biblical law is sometimes used to argue against the immediatist approach to ending abortion.

Immediatism claims that pro-life legislators (and others) are acting immorally when they enact legislation that regulates abortion, rather than immediately criminalize it as homicide. This is because the regulation of murder is inherently unjust. Those who oppose immediatism are known as incrementalists or gradualists, and they claim that unjust law can be ethically enacted on the way to just legislation, as long as it is better than the current laws on the books.

To support this claim, some incrementalists will use the blood avenger in Moses to claim that God’s law is unjust (needing gradual reform), because it failed to punish a blood avenger who unjustly killed an innocent manslayer. The primary passage of interest reads as follows:

And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall select cities to be cities of refuge for you, that the manslayer who kills any person without intent may flee there. The cities shall be for you a refuge from the avenger, that the manslayer may not die until he stands before the congregation for judgment…

“But if he pushed him suddenly without enmity, or hurled anything on him without lying in wait or used a stone that could cause death, and without seeing him dropped it on him, so that he died, though he was not his enemy and did not seek his harm, then the congregation shall judge between the manslayer and the avenger of blood, in accordance with these rules. And the congregation shall rescue the manslayer from the hand of the avenger of blood, and the congregation shall restore him to his city of refuge to which he had fled, and he shall live in it until the death of the high priest who was anointed with the holy oil.

“But if the manslayer shall at any time go beyond the boundaries of his city of refuge to which he fled, and the avenger of blood finds him outside the boundaries of his city of refuge, and the avenger of blood kills the manslayer, he shall not be guilty of blood.” (Num 35:9-12, 22-27)

Odd as it may sound to modern ears, the provision of refuge cities enacts through regulation a special criminal justice proceeding for those accused of murder. Like the issue with divorce, it isn’t a law that determines the differences between just and unjust forms of killing, though such moral legislation is found in the immediate cited and uncited context. Rather, it is a procedural law which helps to ensure a fair and just trial of the accused when he faces the potential penalty for his homicide.

The Blood Avenger as a Civil Authority

A key point to understand is that the avenger serves an official role in the civil government of Israel. Whereas we in America employ specialists to enforce punishment for crime, Moses conscripted all of Israel to serve in the military, and to serve as enforcers for the decisions reached by judges and town leaders. The avenger of blood is carrying out the divine obligation of retribution for murder in Genesis 9. This passage then regulates and limits the situations in which he may perform his enforcement duties.

The gradualist / incrementalist claim about this passage is that it fails to punish the avenger (i.e. the government-endorsed executioner) when he murders an innocent manslayer, before the manslayer is able to reach a city of refuge. Therefore the law of Moses is unjust, and it is acceptable for Gentile legislators to create unjust law, on the way to a more perfect order. However, this claim of injustice in Moses simply reflects a failure to recursively apply the law to the executioner.

The Blood Avenger as a Fellow Citizen

To put it another way, just as American civil servants are obligated to carry out their duties lawfully (lex rex), the mosaic executioner is under the same scrutiny and constraints of Moses that every other citizen is under, as evidenced by the concern for his own bloodguilt in verse 27. This includes the unjustified killing of a manslayer. So when Moses prohibits lying in wait out of hatred for a victim – killing with malice aforethought (Num 35:20, etc.), this would include the execution of a manslayer out of malice aforethought, bringing its own civil penalties for misuse of civil authority. Avengers must themselves show that they are carrying out their duties of execution according to the principles of justice expounded in Moses.

So if an avenger knows that the manslayer killed by accident, then he is morally obligated to let the man escape to a city of refuge for trial. If he kills the man regardless, out of a malicious and misplaced sense of personal vengeance, then this abuse of authority is itself subject to trial and punishment by Moses.

On the other hand, if he killed the manslayer before he reached the city of refuge, but did not possess information of the man’s innocence, then the act was not ethically a form of murder, because it was missing malicious intent. The manslayer was simply killed by the justice system. The result is not ideal, but no one expects human justice to always lead to perfect results. There are innocent people killed, imprisoned, fined, and otherwise punished by justice systems that are behaving ethically, but which simply made mistakes because of bad or incomplete information (Deu 19:15-21). We want to reduce mistakes as much as possible, but ultimately it is the final judgement by God that sets people in their proper place. From an ethical standpoint, manslaughter (not murder) occurs when the avenger mistakenly kills another manslayer without malice aforethought.

The Blood Avenger In Practice

With that said, when you think through the practical way in which the avenger / refuge provisions of Moses are structured, we actually have plenty of reasons to think that this is a system that would intrinsically reduce instances of the avenger killing an innocent manslayer out of a simple problem of timing the flight to refuge. It may have been a very good system, odd as it sounds to modern ears.

Both the manslayer and the blood avenger face a problem of community approval. Both are individuals living amid a (collectively) more powerful community, in which any other person is authorized to enact justice for manslaughter. Both will have their lives upended upon the taking of another life, and both therefore face the daunting prospect of potentially having to flee to a city of refuge, if the community views the killing as unauthorized.

If no one witnessed the initial homicide, then the manslayer should have time before the body is discovered to prepare for his journey. If people witnessed it, and it was perceived to be an accident, then the avenger faces a community opinion which disagrees with his vengeance, at which point he faces the daunting prospect of his own homicide flight and trial with witnesses.

The manslayer who would have difficulty fleeing for one reason or another would also be able to appeal to his immediate community for assistance, which (if they cared about and believed the manslayer) could be carried out by accompanying the manslayer to the city of refuge. This dynamic thereby encourages positive community relationships, and should have had a sanctifying influence on people who would have been otherwise disposed to be selfish, unhelpful, and/or isolated.

Concerning the objection at hand, if an avenger is truly attempting to murder the manslayer (with malice aforethought) he himself could be required to flee, if a family member of the manslayer decided that the avenger’s actions were unjust. In other words, the executioner needs to be confident enough in the community’s acceptance of his actions to carry out vengeance against the manslayer. Otherwise, he faces the same risk, flight, trial, and upending of his life that the original manslayer faced.

Moses therefore does not enact injustice in his provisions for the execution of manslayers. Rather, he defines a very elegant and lightweight system of justice that forces a trial only through great effort by those who truly believe in their own innocence (otherwise they would flee out of Israel). Because he applies the same standard to government officials that oversee ordinary people, bringing great risk to the avenger who might otherwise abuse his position of authority, the system keeps itself in check by making use of the genuine beliefs of the manslayer and the avenger about how their killing will be perceived by the people around them.

As with other incrementalist claims about Moses, this is not a situation where Moses is unjust, needing incremental reform to bring his law code into conformity with ultimate morality. Rather, Moses was just by definition, being given by God, who does not embed injustice in the commands that he gives to his people. Contrary to incrementalist claims, Moses does not grant special murder rights to blood avengers, just because he fails to spell out special provisions to prevent their abuse of authority. He doesn’t need to spell out such provisions, because his law code already prohibits as murder the taking of human life with malice aforethought. That applies just as much to the civil servant / executioner as it does to the everyday citizen, and therefore the incrementalist should repent of charging God with writing injustice into the law he gave to Moses.

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Understanding Abolition

The pro-life movement is not a biblical movement, and their leaders often work against the ending of abortion. Tap into the principles below to learn the difference between abolitionist and pro-life efforts against abortion.

Abolition Is:

The great theme of the Bible is God's work to abolish evil and its effects from the human condition and environment. As Christians who believe that the Bible is true and divinely inspired, abolitionists participate in God's work by establishing our movement on the word of God, and using its principles to effect positive change in the world.

In contrast, the pro-life movement incorporates Christians and non-Christians together in a Secular work to oppose abortion in various ways. While Christian pro-lifers will quote Bible verses against abortion in superficial ways, the movement itself defines its goals and methods according to principles that fundamentally oppose biblical teaching on how to remove evil and bring genuine healing.

The pro-life movement regularly opposes legislation that would grant equal protection to pre-born humans by criminalizing abortion. In some cases, pro-life lobbyists and legislators are the primary reason that this legislation does not pass.

This is because the pro-life movement believes that the woman who willfully kills her child is a victim in the process, rather than a perpetrator. Therefore they turn to unjust forms of discriminatory legislation in an attempt to pragmatically, rather than ethically, reduce the amount of abortions performed.

While there is a great deal of false information propagated to support the universal victimhood of women, and such false information should be refuted, the biblical standard is clear regardless. Anyone who conspires to kill an innocent human being is guilty of murder, thus the homicide code should reflect that reality.

We do not grant mothers permission to murder their three-year-olds with impunity, even when the mothers are facing difficult situations. In the same way, we should not grant mothers permission to murder their pre-born children, even when the mothers are facing difficult situations. All human beings are created in the image of God, and are therefore equally valuable before God, regardless of their age.

We live in a culture that is filled with post-abortive fathers and mothers. From a merely practical standpoint, the only way to effect national repentance will be to share with our people the bad news of God's judgement on sin, together with the good news that God forgives and redeems repentant murderers, when we are honest with him about our sin.

With that said, this personal message alone does not do justice to the whole gospel presented in scripture. It is true that Jesus came to redeem individual sinners from an eternity in Hell. But his work on the cross was done to redeem the whole of creation, and therefore has implications in the present day for any sinful aspect of human society. This means that it is appropriate to speak of gospel-centered politics, gospel-centered economics, and gospel-centered activism, etc., in contradiction to humanistic and other man-centered approaches to these disciplines.

Abolition is therefore a holistic gospel-centered movement in that it addresses the needs of individuals, and of nations, as we grapple with the impact of sin on our personal and corporate lives.

In the work to end slavery, two schools of thought competed for dominance in anti-slavery legislation. The colonizationists and their predecessors in Britain pursued various degrees of compromise with the slavers that would gradually reduce slavery until it was finally ended. The abolitionists instead sought legislation that would immediately bring an end to the practice without exception or compromise, and they were ultimately the group that succeeded. These two schools of thought became known as gradualism and immediatism respectively, and have been applied to various human rights conflicts since that time.

The pro-life movement is like the colonization society in that it pursues gradualist legislation that compromises with abortion, rather than seek its immediate end. it does this under the belief that compromising legislation is more practical than uncompromising legislation.

In many cases it is truly practical to compromise with opponents. However, when dealing with an issue of sin, compromise has the side effect of further embedding the sinful activity into one's life or society. When a pornography addict compromises with his addiction, for example, his seeking to reduce consumption rather than completely and immediately cut it off will ultimately make him more complacent and enslaved to it.

Scripture teaches us to take a radical, no-compromise approach to the abolition of sin in our personal lives, and the same principles apply to legislation in our national life. As such, while the pro-life / gradualist approach may sound pragmatic, it is ultimately impractical and self-defeating, due to the nature of sin.

Abortion is sin, and the only answer to sin is the gospel. Because the Christian Church is the institution that was commissioned by Jesus to spread the gospel message, this means that she should be at the center of the war against abortion and other destructive evils in society.

Unfortunately, due to various bad theologies and general complacency, the Church has largely abandoned the fight against national evils like abortion. Abolitionist societies and other parachurch ministries have risen up to fill the gap and organize Christian responses to evil, but these fail to provide the holistic, unified community that Jesus designed to serve as salt and light in a dying culture. Parachurch ministries have a role to play in organizing local churches to particular tasks, but they should always be supplemental, with the institutional Church driving Christianity's response to both personal and social evils.

Thus historic and modern abolition includes a message of repentance to Christians and to churches who fail to give a biblical, comprehensive response to the rise of sin in our dying culture. Individual Christians must repent of our failure to know and act upon the duties that God gives us to stand against evil. Churches need to repent of believing false and unbiblical ideas that reduce the gospel to only the personal salvation of souls, and their general failure to teach Christians what God expects of us in response to social evils like child sacrifice.

One of the unique features of Christianity is its reliance on the providence of God over the pragmatism of man to bring about its desired results. When Jesus went to the cross, this contradicted all of the worldly wisdom of his time on how to establish political power to advance one's own agenda. Instead of compromise with the religious and political leaders of his day, Jesus rebuked them, held them accountable to the higher standard of God, and trusted that God would deliver him through the persecution they would bring upon his head.

More importantly, Jesus trusted that God would establish his kingdom through his faithful obedience rather than pragmatic compromise. Because God truly does rule over the world, the most practical, pragmatic thing a person can do is to align himself with God's will, even when it contradicts the flawed logic of rebellious man. Thus abolitionists rely on the providence of God rather than the worldly wisdom of man, measuring our lives and our movement against his word, even when obedience to it seems counterintuitive.

Work in the pro-life movement is often separated into those who offer assistance to women in need, and those who agitate for public change. Abolitionism holds that Christians are required to participate in both kinds of activity, speaking the truth in love. Uniting these two modes in every abolitionist prevents love from devolving into a false, untruthful form, and truth from being delivered in a cold and arrogant way.

Abolitionists Bring: