20 The Lord said to Joshua, ² “Say to the people of Israel, ‘Choose the cities where you may go and be safe when you are in trouble, as I said to you through Moses. ³ So the man who kills any person without meaning to or planning to may run to one of these cities. They will be places where you can go to be safe from the one who wants to punish you for the killing. ⁴ He will run to one of these cities and stand at the city gate. There he will tell his story to the leaders of that city. They will take him into the city and give him a place. So he may live among them. ⁵ If the one who wants to punish him comes after him, they will not give him the one who killed the person, because he killed his neighbor without planning to, and did not hate him in the past. ⁶ He will live in that city until he has been tried in front of the people. And he will live there until the death of the one who is the head religious leader at the time. Then the one who killed the person may return to his own city and his own house, to the city he ran away from.’”

⁷ So they set apart Kedesh in Galilee in the hill country of Naphtali. They set apart Shechem in the hill country of Ephraim. And they set apart Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron) in the hill country of Judah. ⁸ On the other side of the Jordan east of Jericho, they set apart Bezer in the desert plain from the family of Reuben. They set apart Ramoth in Gilead from the family of Gad. And they set apart Golan in Bashan from the family of Manasseh. ⁹ These were the chosen cities for all the people of Israel and for the stranger staying among them. So whoever killed any person without meaning to could run there. He could not be killed by the one who wanted to punish him, before standing trial in front of the people.