Halakhah zu Bamidbar 35:24

And also of this type is His, may He be exalted, saying that a betrothed maiden that is promiscuous is [killed] by stoning; but [if she is] the daughter of a priest, by burning - which are the filling out of the details of the law of [adultery with] a married woman. And everyone, who I have heard of already, erred in this - counting a married woman as a commandment, a betrothed maiden as [another] commandment and the daughter of a priest as [yet another] commandment, when the matter is not like this. Rather it is as I shall explain. And that is that His, may He be exalted, saying, "you shall not commit adultery" (Exodus 20:13), is a commandment from the tally of the commandments - and the tradition came that this negative commandment is the prohibition of the married woman. Afterwards, Scripture explained that one who violates this negative commandment is killed; and that is its saying, "they shall surely be killed, the adulterer and the adulteress" (Leviticus 20:10). Afterwards, Scripture filled in this detail and the conditions of this issue and judgement. So it stipulated conditions and said that that which is stated - "they shall surely be killed, the adulterer and the adulteress" - has distinctions: If she was a married woman that was the daughter of a priest, she is burned; if she was a betrothed virgin maiden, she is stoned; and if she was married but was not the daughter of a priest, she is strangled. But it is not that the stipulations of the laws of [its] death penalty expand it into several commandments; for we have not exited the prohibition of the married woman in all of this. And in Sanhedrin (Sanhedrin 51b:10), they said in explanation, "All were included in 'the adulterer and the adulteress': [Then] the verse singled out the daughter of an Israelite for stoning and the daughter of a priest for burning." With this, they meant that regarding the prohibition of a married woman, all are included in that which Scripture said about them, "they shall surely be killed, the adulterer and the adulteress" - however Scripture differentiated about this death, and had some people to be burned and some of them to be stoned. And were it appropriate to count the detail of a commandment when it is written in the Torah, we would have been required to not list one who kills a soul by mistake being exiled as a single commandment, since Scripture has already detailed this commandment (Numbers 35:16-28). So we would have also counted the statement of Scripture, "But if he strikes him with a metal instrument," as one commandment. And the second commandment would have been its saying, "And if he struck him with a stone tool." And the third commandment would have been, "Or struck him with a wooden instrument." And the fourth commandment would have been its saying, "The blood-avenger shall put the killer to death." And the fifth would have been its saying, "Or if he pushed him with hatred." And the sixth would have been its saying, "or hurled something at him on purpose." And the seventh would have been its saying, "Or if he struck him with his hand in enmity." And the eighth would have been its saying, "But if suddenly without enmity." And the ninth would have been its saying, "or hurled any object at him unintentionally." And the tenth would have been, "Or any deadly object of stone without seeing." The eleventh would have been, "and he dropped it upon him and he died, though he was not an enemy of his." The twelfth would have been, "And the congregation shall protect the killer." The thirteenth would have been, "and the congregation shall bring him back to his city of refuge." The fourteenth would have been, "and there he shall remain until the death of the high priest." The fifteenth would have been, "But if the killer surely goes outside." The sixteenth would have been, "and after the death of the high priest, the killer may return." And had we done this with each and every commandment, the number of commandments would have added up to more than two thousand. And the damage [of doing so] is clear, since they are all details of the topic. But the commandment that is counted is the law of one who kills a soul by mistake, and that is the law about which we have been instructed to evaluate the laws and details that are written about it. And likewise did God call them, regulations; and He did not call them, commandments - but said (Numbers 35:24), "And the congregation shall judge between the killer and the blood-avenger according to these regulations."

It is from the roots of the commandment [that] since the matter of capital punishment is a very weighty thing (Rosh Hashanah 26a) which requires the greatest of precision, and the community has been commanded to save the accused with everything that is fit to save him for his sake - not that they pervert the judgement in order to save him, God forbid, and like they, may their memory be blessed, expounded (Rosh Hashanah 26a, connecting the two phrases in Numbers 35:24-25), "And the community shall judge, And the community shall save," meaning to say that they need to search for his merit and if he has a merit, they should save him, and if not, he should be killed - therefore, we were warned that the judgement should at the very least be brought before the court. And the witnesses that saw the thing with their eyes should never judge him, as maybe from their seeing the matter, they will not be able to search for his merit, as their hearts will arouse them to render him guilty no matter what.