[In the past chapters, we heard from the God of Israel who instructs His chosen people how to worship, what to eat, how to weave cloths, even gives prohibition on transgender dressing, etc.; and now here are instructions regarding conquest of the Land or ‘laws of warfare’: first offer ‘shalom’ and if the perceived enemy ‘shaloms’ back, spare them; but if they do not, go ahead and destroy them.
Then, total destruction is commanded for the nation groups with abominable religious practices and the specific reason is given:
In order that they not teach you to do according to all their abominations that they do with their gods, and you sin against YHVH your God.
How particular and specific is the True God in His instructions regarding worship of non-gods? Should we re-examine ourselves in terms of the object of our worship? Are we worshipping the God Who gave such instructions recorded the Hebrew Scriptures? Do we know Him as He revealed Himself on Sinai as recorded in the Torah? Or do we worship gods according to our convenience?
Commentary here comes from the best of Jewish minds, as collected by Dr. J.H. Hertz in his excellent resource Pentateuch and Haftorahs; this website uses EF/Everett Fox The Five Books of Moses..—Admin1.]
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Deuteronomy/Davarim 20
(b) LAWS OF WARFARE
Israel is bidden to display human kindness even in wartime; thus, the betrothed is to be exempt from service; offers of peace are to be made to every city attacked; and fruit-trees are not to be destroyed during a siege. The conduct of war is to be guided by reason and mercy. Israelite kings were famed for their humanity (I Kings XX,31); while contemporary Assyrian monarchs delighted in inhuman savagery, and made it a rule to devastate forests and cultivated fields; Isa. XIV,8.
1-9. EXEMPTION FROM SERVICE
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horses. The Heb. is in the singular, used in a collective sense. ‘In Mine eyes their multitude of horses are as one horse; hence, fear not’ (Rashi).
more than thou. lit. ‘a people too great for thee.’
who brought thee out. The recollection of God’s work for Israel in the past is a pledge of what He will do for them in the future.
2 And it shall be: when you draw-near for war,the priest. Specially appointed for the purpose, and designated in Rabbinical literature as ‘the priest anointed for the war.’
fear not. In your hearts.
neither be ye affrighted. In action.
3 the priest is to approach and speak to the people / and say to them: Hearken, O Israel! You are drawing-near today to war against your enemies. Let not your heart be soft, do not be afraid, do not be in-trepidation, do not be-terrified before them!4 For YHVH your God is the one who goes with you, to wage-war for you against your enemies, to deliver you!
5 Then the officials are to speak to the people, saying: Who is the man that has built a new house and has not (yet) dedicated it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the war and another man dedicate it!
dedicated it. Rashi renders, ‘and hath not begun to live in it.’ His heart will be set upon his house, and not upon the battle. Hence he may flee from battle and cause his companions to do likewise.
6 And who is the man that has planted a vineyard and has not (yet) made-common-use of it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the war and another man make-common-use-of it!not used the fruit thereof. lit. ‘hath not made it profane’, by common use. According to Lev. XIX,23-25, the produce of any fruit-tree was not to be used during its first three years. In the fourth year, the fruit was to be dedicated to God. In the fifth year, the fruit became ‘profane’; i.e. it was permitted to be eaten. Hence the words ‘he hath not made it profane’ mean no more than ‘he hath not used the fruit thereof.’
7 And who is the man that has betrothed a woman and has not (yet) taken her (in marriage)? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the war and another man take her!8 And the officers are to continue to speak to the people, they are to say: Who is the man, the one afraid and soft of heart? Let him go and return to his house, so that he does not melt the heart of his brothers, like his heart!
faint-hearted. Fear is infectious, and the presence of such persons in the host would be a source of weakness and danger.
In these verses, 1-8, we have ‘a shrewed psychological understanding of the dangerous contagion of cowardice, as well as of its probable self-conquest, if given freedom of choice. The contagion of courage would then probably act upon the trembler, and the fear of confessing himself faint-hearted might nerve him to bravery. Compare this genial wisdom with the grim ‘Shot at dawn’ of contemporary military law; with that stark brutality of the ritual of Molech which has sent shell-shocked conscripts in their teens to a dishonoured grave. The Jewish law, at once more merciful and more intelligent, is the combination of universal service with freedom; making militarism its salve, and not its master’ (Zangwill).
9 And it shall be, when the officials finish speaking to the people, the commanders of the armed-forces are to count by head the fighting-people.captains of hosts. The army was to be divided into detachments, with a captain for each.
10-18. CAPTURE OF HEATHEN CITIES
10 When you draw-near to a town, to wage-war against it, you are to call out to it terms-of-peace.proclaim peace unto it. War is to be regarded as the last resort. First of all there must be offers of peace. If these are accepted, no one is to be harmed in person or in possession: the city becomes tributary to Israel. All Traditional commentaries agree that these offers of peace had to be made to all enemy cities, to those of the Canaanites as well. the latter were, in addition, to abandon idolatry and adhere to the Seven Commandments given to the descendants of Noah (i.e. the establishment of courts of justice, and the prohibition of blasphemy, idolatry, incest, murder, robbery and unnatural cruelty).
11 And it shall be: if peace is what it answers you, and it opens (its gates) to you, then it shall be that all the people that are found in it shall belong to you as forced-laborers, and they shall serve you.12 But if they do not make-peace with you, and make war against you, you may besiege it.
13 And when YHVH your God gives it into your hand, you are to strike-down all its males with the edge of the sword.
14 Only: the women and the infants and the animals, everything that is within the town, all its booty, you may take-as-plunder for yourself; you may consume the booty of your enemies that YHVH your God gives you.
15 Thus you are to do to all the towns, those exceedingly far from you, that are not of the towns of those nations.
very far off. Which do not belong to the nations mentioned in v. 17 (and also in VII,1-3).
16 Only: in the towns of those peoples that YHVH your God is giving you as an inheritance, you are not to leave-alive any breath;nothing that breatheth. If they refuse the offers of peace, and are unwilling to give up idolatry and observe the precepts of Natural Religion; see on v. 10.
17 but: you are to devote-them-to-destruction, yes, destruction, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivvite and the Yevusite, as YHVH your God has commanded you.Hittite . . . Jebusite. Only six nations are mentioned here, whereas on VII,1-3 seven nations are named. Ibn Ezra accounts for the omission of “Girgashite’ here because it was the smallest of the seven nations, and negligible. The Jerusalem Talmud states: ‘A three-fold message Joshua sent to the Promised Land before the Israelites entered it. It was to the following effect: “Whosoever wishes to leave the country, let him do so; whosoever desires to make peace, his desire will be granted; and whosoever is determined on war, battle will be joined with him.” The Girgashites left Canaan, and migrated to North Africa; the Gibeonites made peace; and the 31 kings of the cities of Canaan chose to make war, and fell.’ It is clear from Joshua XI,19 that peace-offers were made in every case. The strategem of the Gibeonites may have been due to a desire to obtain some extra privileges.
18 -In order that they not teach you to do according to all their abominations that they do with their gods, and you sin against YHVH your God.that they teach you not. ‘This plainly indicates that, if they are willing to give up their idolatrous abominations, they are to be spared’ (Sifri).
BANNING THE CANAANITES
The moral difficulty in v. 10-18 has been variously met by Jewish and non-Jewish authorities. The traditional Jewish view is sufficiently indicated in the comments above. Non-Jewish exegetes of the older school point out that the ban was a pre-Mosaic institution, not confined to the Semitic world. It is found in peoples as far apart as the Romans and the Mexicans: among them all it was but an exhibition of cruelty for cruelty’s sake. In Israel alone was it moralized—turned into a potent and terrible weapon for the safe-guarding of the Sacred Cause entrusted to Israel’s keeping. Israel’s preservation from depravity and decay was the main anxiety of the Lawgiver. Just as in modern days the preservation of the State is reckoned in every country the supreme law which overrides every other consideration, so was in Israel the preservation of Israel’s religious character. And rightly so, for the whole moral and spiritual future of mankind was involved in that preservation.
Furthermore, the search for a new homeland, and the conquest of such homeland, are not isolated phenomena in World History. The fact is that the population of nearly every European country today had conquered its present homeland and largely destroyed the original inhabitants. Thus, the Saxons all but exterminated the Romanized Celts; and, in turn, the Saxons were ‘harried’ by the Normans in their conquest of England. Even more dreadful was the enslavement or extermination of the native races by both Catholic and Protestant settlers in their Overseas possessions. Now, no nation has ever been called upon to justify the taking of such lands, or its conduct towards the natives who thus passed under its control. The peoples exhaust the vocabulary of praise for those of their national heroes who secured that homeland or colonial possessions for them. Israel alone has such an ethical justification for the conquest of Canaan and the banning of its inhabitants. In Lev. XVII, dealing with the bestialities and moral depravities of the Canaanites, we read: v. 26-28, ‘Ye shall not do any of these abominations . . . (for all these abominations have the men of the land done,which were before you, and the land is defiled); that the land vomit not you out also, when ye defile it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.’
It is thus seen that the Canaanites were put under the ban, not for false belief but for vile action; because of the human sacrifices and foul immorality of their gruesome cults. The judicial extirpation of the Canaanites is but another instance of the fact that the interests of man’s moral progress occasionally demand the employment of stern and relentless methods. ‘Here is no partiality of a merely national God befriending His worshippers at the expense of others, without regard to justice; here rather is a Power making for righteousness and against iniquity; yea, a Power acting with a beneficent regard to the good of humanity, burying a putrefying carcass out of sight, lest it should taint the air. In the execution of His righteous purposes, Almighty God is guided by one supreme aim, namely, the elevation of human character. It is to be observed, that Israel itself is threatened with a similar judgment, in the event of its yielding to the depraved rites and practices of heathendom’ (Bruce).
19-20. DESTRUCTION OF TREES
A precautionary warning to Israel—in view of such practices by nomadic warriors—not to devastate the land they are setting out to conquer.
19 When you besiege a town for many days, waging-war against it, to seize it: you are not to bring-ruin on its trees, by swinging-away (with) an ax against them, for from them you eat, them you are not to cut-down- for are the trees of the field human beings, (able) to come against you in a siege?is the tree . . . man? The trees of a besieged city must not be cut down, because they are vital to man (Ibn Ezra). The Rabbis deduce from this v. a prohibition of the wanton destruction of anything useful to man.
20 Only those trees of which you know that they are not trees for eating, them you may bring-to-ruin and cut-down, that you may build siege-works against the town that is making war against you, until its downfall.not trees for food. Should the trees, however, not be fruit-bearing, and hence not vital to man, then by all means let them be cut down, if military necessity demands it.