Which my covenant they brake, Although I was an husband unto them [a lord over them] saith the Lord; But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel, After those days, saith the Lord; I will put my law in their inward parts, And in their heart will I write it: [Instead of its being written as now, outside of them, on their hand and on their forehead.] And I will be their God, And they shall be my people.... For I will forgive their iniquity, And their sin will I remember no more.”[547] The blood-covenant symbols of the Mosaic law, all pointed to the possibility of a union of man’s spiritual nature with God; but they did not in themselves either assure or indicate that union as already accomplished; nor did they point the way to it, as yet made clear. They were only “a shadow of the things to come.”[548] Another gleam of the primitive truth, that blood is life and not death, and that the transference of blood is the transference of life, is found in the various Mosaic references to the _goel_ (גֹּאֵל), the person who is authorized to obtain blood for blood as an act of justice, in the East. And another proof of the prevailing error in the Western mind, through confounding blood with death, and justice with punishment, is the common rendering of the term _goel_, as “avenger,”[549] or “revenger,”[550] in our English Bible, wherever that term applies to the balancing of a blood account; although the same Hebrew word is in other connections commonly translated “redeemer,”[551] or “ransomer.”[552] Lexicographers are confused over the original import of the word _goel_;[553] all the more, because of this confusion in their minds over the import of blood, in its relation to death and to justice. But it is agreed on all hands, that, as a term, the word was, in the East, applied to that kinsman whose duty it was to secure justice to the injured, and to restore, as it were, a normal balance to the disturbed family relations. Oehler well defines the goel, as “that particular relative whose special duty it was to restore the violated family integrity, who had to redeem not only landed property that had been alienated from the family (Lev. 25 : 25 ff.), or a member of the family that [who] had fallen into slavery (Lev. 25 : 47 ff.), but also the blood that had been taken away from the family by murder.”[554] Hence, in the event of a depletion of the family by the loss of blood--the loss of a life--the goel had a responsibility of securing to the family an equivalent of that loss, by other blood, or by an agreed payment for its value. His mission was not vengeance, but equity. He was not an avenger, but a redeemer, a restorer, a balancer. And in that light, and in that light alone, are all the Oriental customs in connection with blood-cancelling seen to be consistent.