Just as English distinguishes between “murder” and “kill,” so too does
Biblical Hebrew. And the word used in the Ten Commandments is decidedly “murder”:
רצח. This word appears fewer than fifty times in the Bible and always in
relatively limited circumstances: for what we would designate as murder—that is,
the intentional taking of another person’s life (as in 1 Kgs 21:19)—and for
what we would call unintentional manslaughter (as in Num 35:11). Of course, you
can make a law describing what do to in the case of unintentional manslaughter
(which is what we have in the Bible, with the cities of refuge), but you can’t really
forbid it outright, it being unintentional and all. So what we have in the Ten Commandments
can really refer only to intentional manslaughter: murder. (Joel
S. Baden, Lost in Translation: Recovering the Origins of Familiar Words [Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2025], 81-81)