Year 7, Day 171: Deuteronomy 20

Theological Commentary: Click Here

In Deuteronomy 20 we have a chapter about warfare.  Naturally, this is a pertinent chapter for Moses to give as he prepares to die and Joshua prepares to lead the people into the Promised Land.  The people are about to experience much warfare.  They need to know the rules.

Moses gives the general rule first.  If you besiege a city, first make sure that they aren’t willing to take the easy way out.  See if they surrender.  In other words, don’t fight battles unnecessarily.  I think that’s a generally good practice.  If there is a way to get through a conflict where there is peace and you don’t compromise your own position, take that option first.  In this case, Moses tells the Hebrew people that cities in general who surrender are to become forced laborers to the Hebrew people.

However, Moses makes a simple exception to this general rule.  Of the cities in Canaan, they are to be utterly destroyed.  Nobody is to be left.  When we look at this, we need to remember.  The general rule above still applies.  However, the case of Canaan is a specific place where God Himself is bringing judgment.  It isn’t the Hebrew people that are planning to attack, it is God’s plan of judgment.  It is God who will give the cities over to the Hebrew people.  This is God’s war.  That’s why the general rule of besieging a city can be supplanted.  The Canaanites are to die because God decreed it, not because it’s generally okay to utterly destroy those who oppose us.

Finally, we have a neat little paragraph about the fruit trees around a city.  God doesn’t want the people chopping down the fruit trees to make siege works.  From the perspective of the big picture, this makes a ton of sense.  Fruit trees are one of the land’s natural ways of providing for the animals and people that live there.  When fruit trees are cut down, there is no way to get more fruit unless you plant more trees.  That takes years of cultivation to replace.  What that means is that the incoming population of your own people will have a harder time surviving because they have no trees from which they can eat fruit!  It makes sense to chop down the trees that bear no fruit and use them for siege works but leave the fruiting trees be.

In general, I think that there is a really good principle at work.  Whenever we are in a conflict with another person, don’t allow the conflict to destroy the resources around us.  We need to make sure that we are measuring the cost of our conflict. There is nothing worse than having a conflict that is so bad that when the winner is decided there is nothing left of any value.  In that case, the conflict was ultimately over nothing, and the conflict was truly pointless.  If fighting a battle will ultimately result in the destruction of everything around us, is the battle really worth fighting at all?

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