The Principle
Sanctuary - the provision of temporary protection from prosecution or violence to a person who would otherwise be subject to it - is one of the oldest legal institutions in Western history and one of the most directly traceable to biblical command. The six cities of refuge mandated in Numbers 35 and Deuteronomy 4 and 19 established a due process mechanism for those accused of unintentional killing that has influenced ecclesiastical sanctuary law, modern asylum law, and the contemporary sanctuary city movement.
Biblical Foundation
Numbers 35:11-15 establishes the institution: 'Select some towns to be your cities of refuge, to which a person who has killed someone accidentally may flee. They will be places of refuge from the avenger of blood, so that anyone accused of murder may not die before they stand trial before the assembly.' The cities of refuge are not a permanent escape from accountability - the person who flees there must stand trial before the congregation - but a protected space where the blood avenger cannot operate until due process has been completed.
Deuteronomy 4:41-43 names the three cities east of the Jordan: Bezer, Ramoth, and Golan. Deuteronomy 19:1-10 requires three cities west of the Jordan and specifies the road conditions: 'Build roads to them and divide into three parts the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, so that anyone who kills a person may flee there.' The roads must be passable - the practical accessibility of the refuge is itself a legal requirement.
The theological rationale is given in Deuteronomy 19:10: 'Do this so that innocent blood will not be shed in your land, which the LORD your God is giving you as your inheritance, and so that you will not be guilty of bloodshed.' The city of refuge exists not to protect the guilty from justice but to prevent the shedding of innocent blood - the blood of someone who killed accidentally and would otherwise be killed by the blood avenger before any determination of guilt or innocence could be made.
Numbers 35:24-25 specifies the procedure: 'the assembly must judge between the accused and the avenger of blood according to these regulations. The assembly must protect the one accused of murder from the avenger of blood and send the accused back to the city of refuge to which they fled.' Due process - community adjudication - is required before the blood avenger may act.
Historical Transmission
Medieval ecclesiastical sanctuary drew explicitly on the cities of refuge model. Canon law developed sanctuary as a right of anyone who reached a church or churchyard to be protected from arrest for a specified period (typically 40 days), during which they could negotiate a settlement, seek pardon, or abjure the realm. Gratian's Decretum cited Numbers 35 and the cities of refuge as the canonical basis for ecclesiastical sanctuary, and medieval churches displayed the sanctuary ring or knocker that a fugitive could grasp to claim the protection.
The English Sanctuary Act of 1540, which limited sanctuary to designated churches and eventually abolished it for most serious crimes, reflected the tension between the church's protective function and the state's growing claim to jurisdiction over criminal prosecution. The complete abolition of ecclesiastical sanctuary in England in 1624 ended a tradition that had lasted, in various forms, since the early Christian period.
The Reformation-era asylum tradition - particularly in Swiss and Dutch Reformed cities that offered refuge to religious dissenters fleeing Catholic persecution - reflected the cities of refuge model in a new context. The Huguenot refugees who fled France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) were received in Protestant countries that understood their reception as an expression of the biblical sanctuary obligation.
Key Champions
William Tyndale's English translation of the Pentateuch (1530) made the cities of refuge texts widely accessible to English readers, and the Reformation's emphasis on sola scriptura created communities that took these texts seriously as legal models. The Puritan colonies in New England, which attempted to model their governance on the Hebrew Republic tradition, were aware of the cities of refuge institution as a biblical precedent for just governance.
Contemporary sanctuary city advocates - including mayors of Chicago, New York, and San Francisco who have declared their cities sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants - have explicitly invoked the biblical cities of refuge as one of the precedents for their policies, arguing that the due process principle underlying the biblical institution supports providing protected space for vulnerable people pending fair adjudication of their status.
Modern Application
Modern asylum law - the international legal framework requiring states to provide refuge to persons with a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin - is the most direct institutional heir of the cities of refuge principle. The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol establish the non-refoulement principle: no person may be returned to a country where they face serious risk of persecution. This absolute protection - which continues regardless of the person's status, pending adjudication - mirrors the cities of refuge' protection of the accused killer pending trial.
Sanctuary city policies in the United States - currently in effect in over 500 jurisdictions - typically limit local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, providing a protected space for undocumented immigrants pending immigration proceedings. The 2017 Trump administration's threats to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities generated major constitutional litigation about the relationship between federal and local enforcement obligations.
Scholarly Debate
Scholars debate whether the biblical cities of refuge were a purely legal institution or also a theological one. The requirement that the accidental killer remain in the city of refuge until the death of the high priest (Numbers 35:25) - interpreted variously as a limitation on blood vengeance, a kind of involuntary exile, or a priestly expiation of bloodshed - suggests theological dimensions that go beyond merely procedural due process. The scholarly debate about whether sanctuary law and asylum law are genuine moral obligations or merely pragmatic policies has contemporary relevance: is the obligation to provide asylum grounded in universal moral principles with biblical roots, or is it a convention that states may modify as they see fit in response to migration pressures?