single sherd left by a tiny fleeing band of frightened refugees. Finkelstein and Silberman concluded that based on the evidence at the specific sites where says that the Israelites camped for extended periods during their wandering in the desert (and where some archaeological indication — if present — would almost certainly be found), a mass Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible. Numbers chapter 35 Professor Tamara Cohn Eskenazi of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion wrote that Biblical laws required Israelites to act as redeemers for relatives in four situations: (1) redemption of land in , (2) redemption of persons from slavery, especially in , (3) redemption of objects dedicated to the sanctuary in , and (4) avenging the blood of a murdered relative in . The 20th century Reform Rabbi Gunther Plaut argued that the discussions of Cities of Refuge in and and were composed during a later, settled period, in order to accommodate the disappearance of local altars that previously served as places of refuge. Noting that provided that the person who had committed manslaughter would remain in the city of refuge until the death of the high priest, Plaut argued that only death could compensate for the loss of the victim's life, and thus the death of the High Priest became the symbol of communal expiation. Explaining the origins of the law that one can see in the Cities of Refuge, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that early forms of legal procedure were grounded in vengeance. Roman law and German law started from the blood feud, which led to the composition, at first optional, then compulsory, by which the feud was bought off. Holmes reported that in Anglo-Saxon practice, the feud was pretty well broken up by the time of William the Conqueror. The killings and house-burnings of an earlier day became the appeals of mayhem and arson, and then the legal actions now familiar to lawyers. The 19th century American clergyman H. Clay Trumbull argued that the "redeemer" (, goel) in was responsible for securing for the victim's family an equivalent of their loss of blood — the loss of life — by other blood, or by an agreed-upon payment for its value. Trumbull taught that the redeemer's mission was "not vengeance, but equity. He was not an avenger, but a redeemer, a restorer, a