seekeroftruth
Well-Known Member
Deuteronomy 20:10 When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. 11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
16 However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy[a] them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. 18 Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.
19 When you lay siege to a city for a long time, fighting against it to capture it, do not destroy its trees by putting an ax to them, because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down. Are the trees people, that you should besiege them?(b) 20 However, you may cut down trees that you know are not fruit trees and use them to build siege works until the city at war with you falls.
16 However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy[a] them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. 18 Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.
19 When you lay siege to a city for a long time, fighting against it to capture it, do not destroy its trees by putting an ax to them, because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down. Are the trees people, that you should besiege them?(b) 20 However, you may cut down trees that you know are not fruit trees and use them to build siege works until the city at war with you falls.
a. Deuteronomy 20:17 The Hebrew term refers to the irrevocable giving over of things or persons to the Lord, often by totally destroying them.
b. Deuteronomy 20:19 Or down to use in the siege, for the fruit trees are for the benefit of people.
IMHO...All of God's Wars are Holy. None of human wars are holy. Humans, however, start wars and blame them on God just because they are humans.
Here's the easy English quote for this morning.
The Israelites could offer an agreement for peace to people who lived in cities a long distance away. The people might agree to that. Then they would become slaves of the Israelites. (That happened to the people from Gibeon. They pretended that they had come from a long distance away Joshua 9:1-27. If the city refused this agreement for peace, the Israelites killed all the men. The *sraelites could keep the women, the children and the animals for themselves. If the cities were near to their country, the Israelites must destroy everyone and everything. This seems severe to us. But the people who lived in Canaan were very evil. If the Israelites had not attacked them, those enemies might have destroyed the Israelites. Also, the Israelites might have worshipped the false gods of their enemies. Their enemies worshipped false gods. That involved many wicked practices that God hated. Therefore, the commands are not about a nation who must fight another nation. Rather, the commands are about God’s people. They must be against those nations that hate God. Israelites accepted people from other nations who wanted to worship Israel’s God.
This is from bibletrack.org.
When Israel's army moves into a territory and the people surrender, make them tributaries. If they fight against Israel, kill all the men. This applied to territories outside Canaan. None of the Canaanites should be permitted to stay because of their heathen worship practices - might rub off on the Israelites; the Hebrews did seem to gravitate to a good-looking idol. Again, keep in mind Deuteronomy 9:4 regarding these pagan inhabitants of Canaan, "...but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD doth drive them out from before thee." God had already passed judgment upon these people just as certainly as he had on Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19). Israel was simply to be God's instrument of judgment here. Also they were instructed, when you make war against the Canaanites, take it easy on the natural resources.
Studylight.org says titled these verses "unselfish conquest".
The difference between the Jews and other people is precisely this:--All the great nations that we read of have effected extensive and, on the whole, salutary conquests. Their triumphs have been the means of spreading law, government, civilisation, where they would otherwise not have reached. They have swept away feeble, corrupt, sensualised people, who had become animal worshippers or devil worshippers, and had lost all sense of their human dignity. But we feel that the nations who have done these works have done them in great part for their own glory, for the increase of their territory, at the instigation and for the gratification of particular leaders. All higher and more blessed results of their success, which it is impossible not to recognise, have been stained and corrupted by the ignoble and selfish tendencies which have mixed with them, and been the motives to them; so that we are continually perplexed with the question, what judgment we shall form of them, or what different causes we can find for such opposite effects. There is one nation which is taught from the very first that it is not to go out to win any prizes for itself, to bring home the silver or gold, the sheep or the oxen, the men servants or the women servants; that it is to be simply the instrument of the righteous Lord against those who were polluting His earth, and making it unfit for human habitation
So... I've come up with a whole list of stupid things to say about war... and anger... and yelling at someone in a grocery store with their little dog sitting up in the basket.... but I think it's just fine to say.... don't go to war unless you know diplomacy has run its course.
Don't willfully destroy the crops or the trees or the wildlife.... they aren't human and they didn't start it....
