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Chapter 21

Levitical Cities. The heads of the Levite families[a] approached Eleazar the priest, Joshua, son of Nun, and the heads of families of the other tribes of the Israelites(A) at Shiloh in the land of Canaan, and said to them, “The Lord commanded, through Moses, that cities be given us to dwell in, with pasture lands for our livestock.”(B) Out of their own heritage, according to the command of the Lord, the Israelites gave the Levites the following cities with their pasture lands.

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Footnotes

  1. 21:1 The order to establish special cities for the Levites is given in Nm 35:1–8. The forty-eight cities listed here were hardly the exclusive possession of the Levites; at least the more important of them, such as Hebron, Shechem, and Ramoth in Gilead, were certainly peopled for the most part by the tribe in whose territory they were situated. But in all these cities the Levites had special property rights which they did not possess in other cities; cf. Lv 25:32–34.