Communal Atonement for an Unsolved Murder

(Deuteronomy 21:1 - 21:9)
“If, when you have settled in the land Jehovah your god is giving you, you find someone dead in the fields and it is not known who may have killed him, your elders and judges should come out into the field and measure the distance from it to nearby towns.  The elders of the town nearest to where the man was slain should take a heifer, one that has never been worked or worn a yoke, and lead it into a valley that has never been plowed or planted and where there is a flowing stream.  There, in the valley, they should break its neck.  The Levite priests should should be present, for Jehovah your god has charged them to minister to him and to make blessings in his name, as well as to settle with their pronouncements all disputes and all matters involving assaults.  All the elders of the town nearest to where the man was slain should wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, and they should proclaim, ‘Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes witness its shedding.  Accept, O Jehovah, this atonement for your people, Israel, whom you, Jehovah, have redeemed, and do not hold your people guilty of shedding the blood of an innocent person.’  The murder will then be atoned for and you will have purged yourself from the guilt of shedding innocent blood, since you will have done what is right in the eyes of Jehovah.”

Notes
1. An apparently murdered corpse is found in a field.  No one knows how he came to be killed.  This is what should then transpire.  But it seems the instructions here foster some jumping to conclusions.  What if it is unclear whether the dead man was murdered or died as a result of an accident?  How can those examining the body know whether the man was murdered, or was killed in an honest fight or by someone acting in self-defense?

2. This section illustrates the concept of collective, communal guilt.  Modern thinking would place the blame on the murderer alone and not on a community that was totally ignorant of the crime, even to the extent of not knowing whether the murderer was even a member of the community.  The sacrifice of the heifer seems strictly primitive, witch-doctor stuff conforming to the dictate that blood must be atoned by blood, that a murder must be atoned by another murder (even if it be that of an animal), and that guilt must be washed away with blood.  (Indeed, there seems to be no offense of Jehovan law that cannot be put right be killing some poor animal.)

3. No provision seems to be made for Israelites living in areas where there would no valley with a stream running through an untilled field.  They would not be able to properly perform the atonement ceremony and apparently would be forever guilty of a crime they did not commit and had no knowledge of.