Scripture Daily

Context No. 1395 of 4322 · Deuteronomy

Context · Reflection

Deuteronomy 20:10-20: in context

10When you draw near to a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace to it. 11It shall be, if it gives you answer of peace and opens to you, then it shall be that all the people who are found therein shall become forced laborers to you, and shall serve you. 12If it will make no peace with you, but will make war against you, then you shall besiege it. 13When the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, you shall strike every male of it with the edge of the sword; 14but the women, the little ones, the livestock, and all that is in the city, even all its plunder, you shall take for plunder for yourself. You may use the plunder of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you. 15Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far off from you, which are not of the cities of these nations. 16But of the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes; 17but you shall utterly destroy them: the Hittite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you; 18that they not teach you to follow all their abominations, which they have done for their gods; so would you sin against the LORD your God. 19When you shall besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them; for you may eat of them. You shall not cut them down, for is the tree of the field man, that it should be besieged by you? 20Only the trees that you know are not trees for food, you shall destroy and cut them down. You shall build bulwarks against the city that makes war with you, until it falls.

These are laws for Israel's warfare, and they hold hard and humane things side by side. When you march against a city, God commands, first offer it terms of peace; only if it refuses and makes war are you to besiege it. Toward distant cities there are limits. But toward the Canaanite nations already in the land there is the hard command of total destruction, so that they will not teach Israel their abominations. And then, unexpectedly, a law of restraint even in siege: do not destroy the fruit trees by wielding an axe against them, for is the tree of the field a man, that it should be besieged by you? The trees that give food are to be spared.

This passage will not let us have only its gentler parts. The command to destroy the Canaanite nations utterly is genuinely hard, and it should not be tidied away or explained into comfort; it belongs to a particular moment of judgment on peoples whose entrenched evil, including the burning of their own children to idols, the passage itself names as the reason, and it is not offered as a general pattern for how God's people are to treat their neighbors. We are right to feel its weight. And yet, set beside that severity, the same law builds in surprising restraints that are worth seeing. Israel must offer peace to a city before attacking it. And even in the pressure of a siege, they are forbidden to cut down the fruit trees, with a question that is almost tender: is the tree of the field a man, that you should besiege it? The tree has done you no wrong; it will feed you and those who come after; do not destroy it needlessly. In the middle of war, God commands that the innocent and the fruitful be spared, that destruction have limits, that not everything be laid waste simply because one can. There is a principle here that outlasts the ancient wars: that even in conflict, even when force is permitted, wanton destruction is forbidden, and the innocent and the life-giving are to be protected. The hard command and the humane limit stand together in the text, and honesty requires us to hold both.

Even in my conflicts and struggles, do I observe the limits God builds in, offering peace first and refusing needless destruction, sparing what is innocent and life-giving rather than laying waste everything simply because I can?

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