Deuteronomy 19:3-5

Revised Geneva Translation

³ “You shall prepare the way for yourself and divide the coasts of the land which the LORD your God gives you to inherit into three parts, so that every manslayer may flee there.

⁴ “This also is the cause for which the manslayer shall flee there and live: whoever kills his neighbor ignorantly and did not hate him in time past —

⁵ “as he who goes to the forest with his neighbor to cut wood and his hand strikes with the axe to cut down the tree, if the head slips from the helve and hits his neighbor so that he dies—the same shall flee to one of the cities and live;