כי יכרית, “When He will cut down, etc.” Nachmanides writes that the basic legislation (Exodus 21,13) following had already been made public, Moses now elaborates on it.

וישבת בעריהם, “and you will settle in their cities;” establishment of cities of refuge does not become obligatory until after the people have settled on the land. There are additional midrashim based on the wording of this paragraph.

ואם ירחיב ה' אלוקיך את גבולך, “and if the Lord your G’d will expand your boundaries, etc.;” (condensed version of Nachmanides) At the beginning of the paragraph Moses spoke of the nations that G’d would dispossess, i.e. the seven well known Canaanite nations, and he commanded that after these cities had been resettled with Israelites, three cities of refuge in addition to the ones Moses himself had already set aside as such on the east bank of the Jordan were to be designated as such. (Compare Deut. 4,41) With the addition of the cities mentioned here the commandment of setting aside such cities would have been fulfilled in its entirety. All the commandments that were legislated with a view to being observed after conquest of the land are understood to become effective after the people had received their share of the land and had settled thereon. It is interesting that at this point, though Moses is apparently speaking about a law already formulated when the people had just received the Ten Commandments, that he does not add the words כאשר דבר לך, “as He (Hashem) had said to you” [40 years ago. Moses had used this formula no fewer than 5 times when elaborating on laws in the first 4 Books of the Torah. Ed.] The reason may be that what Moses refers to as the “broadening of the borders of the land of Israel” is the inclusion of the land of the three tribes promised at the covenant between the pieces to Avraham, but soft-pedaled since that time. (Compare Genesis, 15,19-21). This may be the reason why he adds the words כאשר נשבע לאבותיך, “as He has sworn to your patriarchs,” and again in verse 9 אשר דבר לתת לאבותיך, “which He has spoken about to give to your forefathers.” This is in sharp contrast to when he informed the people that after they would settle in the land, meat that has not been consecrated first would be allowed in their respective dwellings. On that occasion, although a broadening of the borders is clearly spelled out, (Deut. 12,20) Moses failed to mention that this had anything to do with promises Hashem had made to the patriarchs. He offered as a rationale for this new law only the fact that the journey to the Temple each time might be tedious. It is fairly obvious, that just as tenure in the land is dependent on the observance of the Torah’s command-ments, so Hashem’s fulfilling the unfulfilled portion of His promise to Avraham would have to await the time when the people‘s claim to the part of the land they had already inherited would prove to be deserved by their loyalty to the Torah. We may conjecture that it had always been Hashem’s intention to let the people inherit the lands of the seven tribes during the lifetime of Moses and Joshua, and that in order to qualify for the balance He gave them all the commandments in the Torah to test them if they were worthy of the remainder of the lands promised to the first of the patriarchs, Avraham.

כי תשמור את כל המצוה וגו'...לאהבה את ה' וללכת בדרכיו, “When you observe this entire commandment….to love the Lord your G’d and to walk in His ways, etc.” This means that the people collectively observe the laws of the Torah in all its aspects. According to Ibn Ezra the word מצוה in the singular mode does not refer to a specific commandment other than the three cities of refuge to the existing ones no additional legislation could be expected in the future.

כי תשמור...כל הימים, “when you will observe for all times etc.” Nachmanides raises the question that seeing that no one (human being) knows the future, how is anyone to know when this time is ripe? He rejects Ibn Ezra (without saying why) who understands the words כל הימים to mean “without interruption,” i.e. that there will not be intervals during which not all the people keep all the commandments. Instead, Nachmanides understands the whole verse as an outline of a historical development of the Jewish people who will culminate in all of them observing all of the commandments from a feeling of love for Hashem. When this idyllic state will have been reached so that there is no longer any fear that the people will backslide from the lofty spiritual niveau, the setting aside of the additional three cities of refuge will become operative because then the territories of the last three Canaanite tribes mentioned in the prophecy to Avraham in Genesis chapter 15 will become part of the Jewish state. Only Hashem knows when that stage of development of the Jewish people will be reached, so that He will be able to fulfill that stage of expanding the boundaries of the Jewish state.

לא תחוס עינך, “Your eye shall not pity him.” Rashi, (basing himself on Sifri) understands the psychology of such “pity” as the argument that it suffices that one person has been killed, how can the situation be improved by killing another person? Nachmanides writes that the correct interpretation here is that the principal message of the verse is the positive commandment to eliminate perpetrators of evil (compare Nachmanides’ comments on rule 14 of Maimonides’ tractate ספר המצוות, describing why he included what in his list of 613 commandments.) A secondary consideration, added to reinforce the urgency with which observance of the positive commandment is to be pursued, is this negative commandment to refrain from finding excuses for the killer. Moses already offered a similar consideration when he warned the people not to have pity on people who try to seduce others to worship idols. [A crime committed in the privacy of one’s home. Ed] (Deut. 13,9) When the Torah, in Exodus 22,17 legislates bluntly, without further ado, מכשפה לא תחיה, “you must not allow a sorceress to live,” apparently addressing the commandment only to the female gender, this is misleading. Seeing that women are more involved than men when it comes to sorcery, the wording of the commandment reflects the fact that the lawgiver is aware of this. Men sorcerers are equally liable to execution. (Compare Ezekiel 22,5 and Nachum 3,4) [One tends to have more pity with women, even if they committed crimes, trying to excuse their crimes because of valid motives that might have prompted them. By singling out the women as the standard perpetrators of certain crimes, the Torah tries to counter such tendencies. Another example, even more easily understandable, is found in Deut. 25, 11-12 where the wife who came to the assistance of her husband who was in a life and death struggle with another man, is subject to a severe penalty for the manner in which she intervened. Most people would have sided with the wife, whose motive was simply to save the life of her husband. [The Torah teaches that Hashem’s psychology operates on a different wavelength. Ed.] Humans tend to overlook wrongs done when the wronged party did not suffer tangible loss, money, loss of property, loss of limb, etc., but if “only” pride, dignity, embarrassment were at stake there is a tendency to go easy on the guilty party. “Witnesses” who claim to have witnessed a crime who have been found as having lied before their intended victim has suffered retribution for the supposed crime he had committed, are convicted of precisely the harm they meant to inflict on their victim. Once the damage had been done, and their chicanery did not come to light until it was too late to save their victim, their crime is left to Hashem to deal with, seeing that He is the ultimate arbiter of what is just and what is not

וטוב לך, “and it shall be good for you.” The removal of sources of spilling the blood of innocents is a great mitzvah and in turn will prove to be of great benefit to you, as it will save your own lives, as wasting one’s mercy and pity on murderers will only spawn more deaths by violence not only by the murderers whose lives have been spared, but by others who will be encouraged to achieve their ends by violent means

לא תסיג גבול רעך אשר גבלו הראשונים, “You must not move the boundary of your fellow which earlier ones have marked as such.” The “earlier ones” referred to are the generation of Israelites entering the land with Joshua. Nachmanides writes that the reason behind this commandment, is that later generations, observing that though they have a large family they only have a small piece of land, whereas their neighbours who have only one or two children have a much larger piece of land, will claim that the original clerks doing the measuring had erred at that time. Some people may even challenge the whole system of distributing the land by lottery that had been the basis of the distribution in the time of Joshua. Changing borders is not only forbidden when done at night without anyone seeing it, but also when done in daylight in plain view of everyone. The message Moses leaves the people is that if they wish to live in peace with one another they will never challenge the method of the original parceling out of the land during the years Joshua was their leader. The phrasing of the verse is in the present tense, as only present borders are easily recognizable, not any changes that might or might not have occurred before the problem surfaces. Present boundaries are sacrosanct.

על פי שני עדים, “on the basis of testimony of to witnesses, etc.” The Torah here uses the number “two” in the construct mode, שני עדים, whereas the last time we had a similar verse the Torah wrote the word שנים עדים. This serves our sages as a hint that sometimes (monetary disputes) even a lone witness is not altogether ineffective but can evoke the need for the accused to swear an oath that he is not guilty of the charge brought by the litigant who only backs it up with a single acceptable witness. (Sifri)

והנה עד שקר העד, “and behold, the testimony was false testimony!” Nachmanides draws our attention to the fact that the Torah did not mention anything concerning how the court knew that the testimony of these witnesses was false. Even when two witnesses contradict a group of twenty, this is not proof that the two have been lying. Unless the person supposedly killed would appear before us alive, we have no definitive proof that the testimony was false. Clearly, when the Torah speaks about the investigations the judges have to carry out, it does not have in mind such incontrovertible evidence to the contrary as the “dead” appearing in front of us alive. This is why we have a reliable tradition which tells us that the nature of the “false” testimony in our verse does not relate to the substance of the testimony but to the alibi of the witnesses, who, though they claim to have been at one location at a certain time, are confronted by other witnesses claiming they had seen them elsewhere at that time. Seeing that the testimony of the second set of witnesses relates to the actual bodies of the first set of witnesses it is relevant. They do not contradict the substance of the first witnesses’ testimony, but to their ability to testify to something they could not have seen at that time. The first set of witnesses, by wanting to deny the claim of the second set of witnesses are not qualified to testify concerning their own selves. Ergo, unless they can produce independent testimony that had been at the location they had claimed to be in the first place, they are declared as “false” witnesses, and will be dealt with accordingly, provided that their testimony has not yet resulted in the judicial murder they had had in mind.

כאשר זמם. “as he has conspired.” Our sages emphasise (Makkot 5) that the Torah decrees this retribution by a human court only if the false witnesses’ testimony had not achieved its purpose. Nachmanides writes that the reason is that the whole subject of עדים זוממים, scheming witnesses, is in the nature of גזרת הכתוב, heavenly decree, intervention in the judicial process by super-human forces. After all, the judges are faced with two diametrically opposed statements concerning location and time, and it is beyond our ability to be certain who is telling the truth. We look at this in the following manner. If two witnesses accuse Reuven of having committed murder, and Reuven had been an upstanding citizen up until then, nothing negative having been known about him, and out of the blue two other witnesses appear throwing serious doubt on the believability of the first two witnesses, we are inclined to think that if Reuven were not innocent of this accusation G’d would not have gone out of His way to send the second set of witnesses to save him from the death penalty. Based on such a consideration we can understand the tendency of the sages to believe the second set of witnesses, and to leave the accused to G’d’s judgment if they erred and he was indeed guilty. If the second set of witnesses appears too late to save the accused, we again assume that G’d would not have allowed the accused to be executed unless he had been guilty of death on account of another crime that he committed, where there had not been any witnesses either. [On the one hand, in spite of the urim vetumim, which the priest could invoke in order to ask Hashem if the accused is guilty, the Torah does not encourage our using supernatural channels except where we are expressly bidden to do so, such as in obtaining G’d’s sanction for expansionary wars. Ed.] Nachmanides also adds that if the accused had been judicially murdered by the testimony of a set of witnesses the family of the innocent victim will move heaven and earth to see that he is exonerated posthumously.