1When you go out to battle against your enemy and you see horse and chariot, troops more numerous than you, you shall not fear them, for the LORD your God is with you, Who has brought you up from the land of Egypt. 2And it shall be, when you approach the battle, that the priest shall come forward and speak to the troops 3and say to them, “Hear, Israel, you are approaching the battle today against your enemies. Let your heart be not faint. Do not fear and do not quake and do not dread them. 4For the LORD your God goes before you to do battle with your enemies to rescue you.” 5And the overseers shall speak to the troops, saying, “Whatever man has built a new house and not dedicated it, let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man dedicate it. 6And whatever man has planted a vineyard and not enjoyed it, let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man enjoy it. 7And whatever man has betrothed a woman and not wed her, let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man wed her.” 8And the overseers shall speak further to the troops and say, “Whatever man is afraid and faint of heart, let him go and return to his house, that he not shake the heart of his brothers like his own heart.” 9And it shall be, when the overseers finish speaking to the troops, they shall appoint the commanders of the armies at the head of the troops. 10When you approach a town to do battle against it, you shall call to it for peace. 11And it shall be, if it answers you in peace and opens up to you, all the people found within it shall become forced labor for you and serve you. 12And if it does not make peace with you, and does battle with you, you shall besiege it. 13And when the LORD gives it into your hand, you shall strike down all its males with the edge of the sword. 14Only the women and the little ones and the cattle and everything that is in the town, all its booty you shall plunder for yourself, and you shall consume the booty of your enemy that the LORD your God gives to you. 15Thus shall you do to all the towns far distant from you, which are not of the towns of these nations. 16Only, of the towns of these people that the LORD your God is about to give you in estate, you shall let no breathing creature live. 17But you shall surely put them under the ban—the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivvite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has charged you. 18So that they will not teach you to do like all the abhorrent things that they did for their gods, and you would offend the LORD your God. 19Should you besiege a town many days to do battle against it, you shall not destroy its trees to swing an axe against them, for from them you shall eat, and you shall not cut them down. For is the tree of the field a human, to come away from you in the siege? 20Only a tree that you know is not a tree for eating, it you may destroy and cut down and build a siege-work against the town that does battle against you, until its fall.
CHAPTER 20 NOTES
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1. see horse and chariot. As we are reminded elsewhere, especially in Exodus and Judges, chariots were the instruments of the great martial nations of the region, first the Egyptians and then the Canaanites, against whom the Israelites stood at a palpable disadvantage. In the early period of the conquest, the Israelites were mostly confined to the rocky high country of Canaan and often fought in what were essentially guerilla forces. This ancient equivalent of an armored corps could well have seemed terrifying to them. The allusion here to God’s bringing Israel up out of Egypt, as Jeffrey H. Tigay notes, is probably meant to recall the great victory over Pharaoh’s chariot corps at the Sea of Reeds.
troops. The collective noun ʿam, which has the more general meaning of “people,” regularly designates “troops” in military contexts.
3. Let your heart be not faint. Rashi translates these exhortations into vividly concrete battlefield terms: “Let your heart be not faint—from the neighing of horses. Do not fear—from the clanging of shields. And do not quake—from the sound of the horns. And do not dread—the sound of the battle-cries.” The “faint” heart is literally a “soft” heart in the Hebrew, but the obvious reference is to fear, not excessive compassion.
5. the overseers. These officials, shotrim, appear to be civilian authorities, empowered both to allow exemptions from military service and to appoint commanders (verse 9).
dedicated. The verb ḥanakh might refer to an actual ceremony of dedication, its fixed sense in later Hebrew usage, or might simply mean “to inaugurate,” “to initiate use.”
6. enjoyed it. The literal meaning of the Hebrew verb is “desacralize.” The law behind that linguistic usage is as follows: during the first three years after planting a vineyard, its use was forbidden, presumably because the vines were immature; in the fourth year, the product of the vineyard was considered “holy to the LORD”; in the fifth year, its sacral status was voided and its fruits could be enjoyed without hindrance.
7. and another man wed her. In all these identically couched statements, the idea that someone else would enjoy what the man had anticipated enjoying suggests that the rationale for all these military exemptions was humanitarian consideration of the soldiers.
8. and the overseers shall speak further. This final exemption is set off from the preceding three because the rationale is not humanitarian but pragmatic: the presence of a coward in the ranks could undermine the morale of those around him.
shake the heart. In keeping with the Hebrew idiom of a “soft” heart, the verb here literally means “melt,” but, again, the clear connotation is fear, not compassion.
10. peace. As the next verse makes clear, “peace” (shalom) here amounts to surrender.
13. all its males. As many commentators note, this would have to be adult males, for we are told in the next verse that the little ones are to be spared together with the women.
16. you shall let no breathing creature live. It is hard to find any mitigation for the ferocity of this injunction to total destruction. The rabbis reinterpreted it, seeking to show that it was almost never strictly applicable. Since the archaeological evidence suggests that the “ban” was never actually implemented, it seems to be the projection in legal imperative of a militant fantasy—but surely a dangerous fantasy.
19. its trees. The Hebrew uses a collective noun, in the singular.
20. Only a tree that you know is not a tree for eating. There may be an echo here of “the tree was good for eating” (Genesis 3:6), evoking the Garden world in which God provided all good things for human enjoyment, and prohibited the fruit of two of the trees. Destroying fruit trees is a despoliation of God’s natural gifts, and since the inhabitants of the besieged town would be economically dependent on the trees, it is a devastating blow against them for the foreseeable future. In fact, it was quite common in the ancient world to cut down the enemy’s fruit trees, either for the practical purpose of erecting siege-works or—as in some instances in which the Greeks destroyed olive groves—out of sheer spite.