Deuteronomy 21:4

the elders of that city Luc. omits.

a valley with running water i.e. with a perennial brook, cp. Amos 5:24 (and see Driver's note here). The running water is usually explained as meant to carry off the blood, but no blood is mentioned; unless it was so in the original law (see introd. note). The primitive idea was rather the checking of a demon or of the spirit of the slain man. Cp. the belief in the preference of spirits for dry places (Luke 11:24) and their aversion to running water (in modern times that ghosts cannot cross bridges, e.g. Tam o" Shanter).

neither plowed nor sown therefore unprofaned by common use, and so meet for a solemn rite. Dillm. (after Ewald): -that the soaked-in blood of the beast, vicariously killed, may not hereafter be uncovered by the cultivation of the ground but rather washed away by the brook." See however, the previous note. Some object the impossibility of finding an uncultivated valley with a running stream, but there are many such.

shall break the heifer's neck The same procedure as J, Exodus 13:13; Exodus 34:20, enjoins for the firstling of an ass not redeemed; cp. Isaiah 66:3, of a dog. In these cases there does not appear to have been shedding of the blood such as took place in all sacrifices proper. This is singular if the killing of the heifer was a piaculum. In the original ceremony was it only conceived as a piece of sympathetic magic, symbolic of the execution of the murderer, and did D transform this into an expiation? Or, conversely, was the original ceremony a sacrifice, and did D, on his principle that sacrifice was valid only at the One Altar, reduce it to the level of the treatment of the firstling of an ass? In Leviticus 4:13-21 (P), the piaculumfor an inadvertent sin of the whole congregation, it is also the elders who slay the victim.