God was not going to micromanage Israel. They needed ways to handle the unknown as well.
Unsolved murders in Israel were no light matter. Deuteronomy 21:1-9 describes such a murder mystery. What do the townspeople do “if anyone is found slain, lying in the field in the land which the Lord your God is giving you to possess, and it is not known who killed him” (v 1)? God likes everything resolved, but in this case someone was killed and the guilty party seemed to be getting away with it. First, they must determine the nearest municipality to the dead body to establish jurisdiction—something still done today. Then the responsible officers were to “take a heifer which has not been worked and which has not pulled with a yoke…down to a valley with flowing water, which is neither plowed nor sown, and they shall break the heifer’s neck there in the valley” (vv 3-4). What a strange thing to do! How would this help? Unsolved crimes like this left a stain on the land. “Blood defiles the land, and no atonement can be made for the land, for the blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it” (Num 35:33). If the perpetrator was unknown, this ritual was designed to make sure each murder would be regarded with abhorrence, especially by the responsible authorities. They were to find a piece of rough land not workable so the stain of the animal’s blood would not fall on soil being cultivated. We can’t help but think of the first murder and the words of the Lord to Cain, “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground” (Gen 4:10). How happy we should be that, even though Christ Himself was murdered by the human race, His precious blood was shed for the very ones guilty of His death, and it “speaks better things than that of Abel” (Heb 12:24). Yes, it speaks peace to our souls!