Deutéronome 21:9

So shall you, O house of Israel, put away from among you whosoever sheddeth innocent blood, that you may do what is right before the Lord.

So will you remove the innocent blood either the punishment for innocent bloodshed or the word “blood” is here to be understood to denote “the blood of the innocent” or (according to some people) you must destroy those who shed blood In my opinion, it is as I have explained [comment on: 7] — innocent blood will not be spilled in your land if you do that which is right in the eyes of God (as expressed in the mystery of “the reward of transgression is transgression” [Avot 4: 2] and “the reward of virtue is virtue” [Avot 4: 2]).

(1) YOU WILL REMOVE THE BLOODGUILT. If the murderer is found afterwards, he will be killed.

(2) FOR YOU WILL BE DOING that which IS RIGHT IN THE SIGHT OF ADONAI.

ואתה תבער, when you are aware of someone’s guilt it is up to you to sentence the party and to carry out the sentence and not to rely on heaven to intervene. When you are unaware of the identity of the guilty party, and you have made exhaustive attempts to find him without success, you may rest assured that G’d Himself will take care of the problem.

ואתה תבער את הדם נקי מקרבך, “and you will remove the innocent blood from your midst.” Rashi explains that in the event the murderer is found after the heifer had already been killed, the murderer is not going free. This sounds strange seeing that we learned in the Talmud, tractate Ketuvot folio 37, that the meaning of the word in our verse is that we use the wording in our verse to learn that administering the death penalty by the sword must be performed by severing the vital arteries of the neck, just as the neck of that heifer was broken by its fall. Rabbeinu Moshe offers a different interpretation of the wording in our verse: the paragraph cited by Rashi deals with a murderer who is sentenced to death and according to the opinion that the death penalty by strangulation is more severe (Compare Talmud tractate Sanhedrin folio 49) than the death penalty by having one’s throat cut. This is also reasonable as the wording of the death penalty both in Exodus 21,12, and in Leviticus, 26,25: i.e. “he must surely be avenged,” and “I will bring a sword upon you that shall execute the vengeance of the covenant;” these lines refer to execution by the sword. The verse in Exodus quoted speaks of the penalty for killing a slave. If this is the penalty for killing a slave, it is logical that the penalty for killing a free man can certainly not be milder. This “logic” makes sense when we assume that the penalty by strangulation is milder than the penalty of cutting the victim’s throat. How can that logic be applied according to the scholar who holds that the penalty of strangulation is harsher than having one’s throat cut? Whence do we derive the law that murdering a free man is punishable by having one’s throat cut? The answer given is that we derive it from a baraitha which compares the law applicable to our portion, i.e. the killing of the heifer as a symbolic action by which the people near the town where the slain person was found declare that they had not been remiss in sending that person out of their town without escort or without basic provisions. If the murderer is found after that procedure has already been performed, according to the opinion that strangulation is a milder penalty than having one’s throat cut by comparing it to the penalty of the killer of a slave being executed by the sword, by reason of the logic we mentioned earlier. If one then would argue what is the meaning of the words in Numbers 35,33:כי לארץ לא יכופר, “but no expiation can be made for the earth” (that absorbed the blood of the slain)? We would have to say that this applies for a case in which the murderer is found only after the Yom Kippur following his having committed the deed. If no atonement had been made by that time it cannot be atoned for retroactively anymore.