Tafsiran Ulangan 4:43: Tze'enah Ure'enah, Chizkuni, Da'at Zekenim & Rabbeinu Bahya

“Bezer, in the desert” [4:43]. A city called Bezer. This was a city of refuge. When a killer had accidentally killed his friend, he ran there and nothing should be done to him there. The Torah wrote this near the verse regarding the cities of refuge.

ואת ראמות בגלעד, “and Ramot in Gilad;” from here we could infer that the tribe of Menashe did not own any land in that region. On the other hand, the Torah wrote in Numbers 32,40 that Moses gave the Gilad to Machir, son of Menashe. How are we to account for this discrepancy? We must assume that the tribes that settled on the east bank of the Jordan all shared some territory formerly known as Gilad. The same appears the case when the Torah wrote in Deut.3,12: וחצי הר הגלעד ועריו נתתי לראובני ולגדי, ויתר הגלעד נתתי לחצי שבט המנשה, “and I gave half of the mountain of Gilad and its towns to Reuven and Gad; and the remainder of the Gilad I gave to half the tribe of Menashe.”

ואת בצר במדבר, “and Betzer in the desert.” This is what Solomon referred to when he said in Proverbs 28,17: “a man burdened with blood guilt will flee to a pit;” he referred to someone who had incurred this guilt inadvertently, or even in self defense, i.e. accidentally. After Reuven (Genesis 37,29) found the pit in which he had left Joseph empty, i.e. he had to assume that he had been the cause of Joseph’s death; he supposedly fled to that town in the desert, later on in the territory of Reuven on the east bank of the Jordan.