Deuteronomy

The Rules of Warfare

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 64-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 064

Dictation Name: RR187AH64

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Our help is in the name of the Lord that made heaven and earth. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man. Oh taste and see that the Lord is good, blessed is the man that trusteth in Him. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee that Thou who art maker of heaven and earth and all things therein art ever mindful of the least of Thy creatures. We therefore come to Thee in boldness to cast our every care upon Thee who carest for us. Bless us and our loved ones, deliver them from their burdens, heal them of their infirmities and make them strong in Thy service and in Thy grace. Bless us now by Thy word and by Thy spirit, In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is from Deuteronomy 20:10-20. The Rules of Warfare. Deuteronomy 20:10-20.

“When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.

11 And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.

12 And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it:

13 And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword:

14 But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee.

15 Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations.

16 But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:

17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee:

18 That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the Lord your God.

19 When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them: for thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down (for the tree of the field is man's life) to employ them in the siege:

20 Only the trees which thou knowest that they be not trees for meat, thou shalt destroy and cut them down; and thou shalt build bulwarks against the city that maketh war with thee, until it be subdued.”

We’ve already seen something in previous weeks of the rules of warfare. We have more in these verses. In verses ten through fifteen distant cities, outside of Canaan, are the subject and in verses eleven through twenty outside of Canaan, or inside of Canaan, although the last two verses apply under any circumstances. In the first instance even though the armies are on foreign soil it is to be defensive warfare against a city state that had attacked the covenant people. In the second instance where Canaan was concerned it was a war of seizure and occupation against the Canaanite peoples. This warfare was legitimate because God the Lord was dispossessing them as tenants of His earth. Outside of Canaan only Amalek was to be treated similarly. Amalek was God’s enemy also and had to be treated as such. Apart from these peoples the practice of total war is strictly forbidden. God’s purpose for the earth is that it becomes His kingdom in faith and obedience. And He requires that His laws protecting all fruit trees be faithfully observed. Only non-fruit trees can be used to build siege works against the city. This law applies to warfare against any people. This means that the means of life, of production, were not to be destroyed. This law is especially important because an ancient and modern practice of war is to destroy fruit trees. To destroy agriculture, the burned earth policy. The Assyrian kings at times actually boasted of this practice. Roman generals such as Pompeii and Titus were very rigorous in applying this strategy. Not infrequently ancient generals and modern ones have boasted that nothing survived in their path.

Mohammed destroyed the palm trees of the [unknown] and he claimed to have had done so by revelation. Modern warfare concentrates on civilian populations and their food producing abilities. This law was observed in the conquest of Canaan. An exemption was made by God’s command through Elisha in the case of Moab centuries later, Second Kings 3:19 and 25 tell us about it. We’re not told the reason for this exemption or exception. But it is clear that it was not simply a statement by Elisha but an order from God. Apart from this when war was waged it was to be against enemy soldiers, not the trees of the field. The future was to be protected by respect for that which sustained life. In verses sixteen through eighteen the radical destruction of the Canaanite cities and their habitants is ordered. These people were radically at war with God. They had been a source of disease and death to Israel before their entrance into the land. They were to be put under the ban to be devoted totally to God, the people could not touch their wealth nor protect the persons of these Canaanites, they were under a ban, a taboo. The Hebrew word is almost identical to our word harem, a secluded woman’s quarter. This applied to everything being off limits that God declared was off limits. There are two kinds of bans, first some persons and things are banned as an abomination to God. Second, others are consecrated to Him and are therefore banned from man’s possession or control. The following are declared in God’s law to be banned:

First the false worship of God is banned because it is offensive and an insult to God. There is a religious contamination in such false worship. Those under a ban contaminate all things. Then second, the seven Canaanite nations were banned. The Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Then third, whatever a man devotes or promises to God is irrevocably God’s property and no man can legitimately promise to God and then go back on his word. In the Christian era a form of the ban has been proscription and excommunication, not always wisely used. The biblical ban has reference to God and His law not to an institution. Proscription in western history has been act of the state either exiling a man or reducing him to an outlaw status. Beginning with the temple in late postexilic times proscription could mean the expropriation by the temple treasury of one’s assets. This was not biblical. Men have no right to assume the power of God in any sphere nor to add to or to diminish God’s law to any degree. When men are indifferent to God’s ban and they see no importance in obedience to God and His law they replace God with a human agency, most commonly now the state. The modern state increasingly places a ban on many of its citizens for very arbitrary reasons. For a number of reasons now, none of them good ones, men’s properties, their money, their assets are confiscated at will even though they are innocent of the charges made against them.

And this is done less and less by due process of law and more and more by the states fiat will. God’s ban is spelled out in His law, man’s ban is an act of arbitrary will and hate and expropriation. In verses ten to fifteen the rules of war laid down by God require that whatever the aggressive acts of the enemy when they reach their city state to besiege it was mandatory to offer terms of peace to it. These rules stipulated that first, these people became thereafter a subordinate state. This meant that they would become a part of the Hebrew realm. Second, they shall serve thee; there would be labor levies of these men. Now such labor levies could be hard as with Israel and Egypt or they could be comparable to the French monarchies local levies but not the levies to build Versace. In these tax levies the people themselves would come together and decide what to do. They would repair their local roads and bridges as a community venture, usually agreed upon after a service in the church. Of course a King like Louis the 14th, like Pharaoh, worked to death countless thousands to build Versace. The labor levy of a city state which surrendered could be light or severe. In Solomon’s later years they were severe towards his own people. But labor levies could be both mild and severe. If the city state rejected the offer of peace then on losing all the men would be killed, their woman and children, their cattle, and all their wealth went to the peoples of Israel. Similar rules of warfare coming from Deuteronomy governed Europe at least through the seventeenth century. Their use was sometimes generous and sometimes brutal depending on the generals in their armies. There was a reason behind this, and one reason why, into the, through the seventeenth century these rules were applied because if the city insisted on carrying on the siege epidemics and plagues would break out in the city and spread throughout the countryside and the death toll would be enormous.

The city state that surrendered became a vassal realm. To further its compliance it could be and often was treated very well. According to Hirsch the word ‘males’ in verse thirteen refers to all capable of waging war. Of verse twenty Hirsch noted and I quote:

“Our text becomes the most comprehensive warning to human beings not to misuse the position that God has given them as masters of the world and its matter to capricious, passionate or merely thoughtless wasteful destruction of anything on earth. Only for wise use has God laid the world at our feet when He said to men ‘subdue the world and have dominion over it’.“ Unquote.

Now warfare is always a brutal matter and never more so than in our time when it is waged against civilians, against churches and against monuments of the past. In World War Two as in Iraq the U.S. went out of its way to destroy churches. Perhaps in another century an honest history of warfare in the twentieth century can be written. It does not take much common sense to observe that where we go to war we are intensely and bitterly hated thereafter as right now in Somalia. Modern warfare has a veil over it to prevent knowledge of the grim facts. Verse eighteen gives a practical reason for the destruction of the Canaanites, that they teach you not to do after all their abominations which they have done unto their gods. So should ye sin against the Lord your God. We don’t have many honest histories of the Canaanites because now our partiality is entirely against those who are outside the faith. The Canaanites in their temples routinely not only had temple prostitutes, male prostitutes, animals for bestial practices and a great deal more. This is why museums do not exhibit some of the artifacts and figurines and what not that they have required from excavations.

Almost nothing that pathologists have written about or [unknown] in his work of the last century was not part of the accepted practice in Canaan. And this is why when they first come into contact with them the Hebrews died like flies. The Canaanites had made evil into a virtue, even as we are doing now! Whether we will proceed to the extent that they had, that it’s a public thing and glorified, God only knows. For Israel to tolerate the Canaanite way of life was to reject God. God makes this emphatically clear again and again throughout the bible. There was no legitimate way to reconcile God’s law word with the Canaanite lifestyle. Then as now all too many want to reconcile good and evil, God and Satan. To all such people God’s clear commandments seem harsh because they are uncompromising. So what we face now is entrenched evil in high places in one country after another seeking steadily to destroy Christianity. Their hatred and their malice is incredible. We have to make a choice, good or evil. We are never spared making that choice. However much men may compromise God eventually pushes them to the point where they have to respond, choose ye this day whom ye will serve. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father make us mindful indeed that we live in a fallen world, not in a garden of Eden. That evil is all around us and we must either convert it or punish it or be destroyed by it. Make us valiant in Thy service. Mindful that we have a great commission to go into all the world and disciple all the nations, teaching them all things that Thou hast commanded. And teach us first to obey Thee. Grant us this in Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] Well Canaanite style of course exists today…[becomes unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. And it’s that passivism when it comes to evil that is destroying the world today. Any other questions or comments?

One of the things we have to recognize is we are being very much protected from a great deal of the evil around us because our source of information is less and less from those who know what is going on and more and more from the media. People who work in missions in intercity areas have incredible stories to tell about what takes place routinely in the streets. And yet people turn away from them if they speak and they do not get invitations to talk about their work. People want only filtered information about the evil around us. Any other questions or comments?

[Question] Sherman’s walk to the sea destroyed all the crops. The United States has its own destruction ban.

[Rushdoony] That was a return to the ancient pagan forms of total warfare and it is interesting that European generals, especially the German general Staff before the Franco-Russian war, studied the terrain and the tactics of Sherman and Grant in order to prepare for warfare. And now everyone practices total war, certainly the most enthusiastic advocate of it in World War Two was Churchill. And when you use total war it will be used sooner or later against you.

[Question] Seeing God in the context of war, in the context of a grim general, makes it possible to see Him active in the world today in a way that’s impossible if you see Him in another light. For example, he’s a great warrior in carrying out mass destruction against a large population of males and now females through AIDs. He’s currently acting, I believe, in striking a terrible blow to the field of medicine, their hands are very bloody with the murder of abortion which is in itself a judgment and an act of war on ungodly people who would move and have an abortion. But for carrying out the crime the health care act now being discussed is a blow against them. And will act to destroy medicine as we know it and possibly open the door for Christians again to start health clinics and deliver health services. And this isn’t really a question but more of a comment that seeing God in the light of a warrior, and an active one, not sitting on His hands in our time but at war right now is a way of awakening people and awakening the church.

[Rushdoony] Well for countless centuries churches have declared that if men will not put to death murderers God will put that society to death finally. But we don’t hear much of that now. And we have a growing problem, our prisons are crowded and they are releasing killers. In many a state the term of imprisonment is one month for each year in the sentence, in other words if you are sentenced for ten years you serve ten months. So it’s creating a crisis and law enforcement is becoming a joke. If we are not going to be hard on evil doers God will be hard on us because we have then said we have more respect for the criminal then for His law. Yes?

[Question] It seems to me that there is a certain degree of squeamishness that one can’t allow oneself as God carries out His judgments. There’s nothing pretty, having grown up in the suburbs and near cities, about seeing cities destroyed by street violence and gangs as they take over and destroy the fabric of the city. There’s nothing pretty about that, it’s warfare going on and to see it in terms of God’s judgment is something that you can’t just, I forget how I would be putting God as not being some kind of flower, a buttercup.

[Rushdoony] Yes, God is no buttercup. Well years ago I recall there was a woman who was regarded with some amusement because she did not want mouse traps that would kill. So she had somewhere got a kind of trap where they walked into and got trapped and then she would take them outside and release them which was an exercise in futility. And I’m afraid that same spirit is too prevalent today. Yes?

[Question] Well women commit abortions they suffer from mental and physical disabilities.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Same man] It’s like an extra curse on their sin.

[Rushdoony] Yes, well our time is waning so let us conclude now with prayer.

Our Father, we thank Thee for Thy word and for its plain speaking. Enable us in our time to confront the growing tide of evil, to bring men and nations under the dominion of Jesus Christ by the proclamation of Thy word. Make us strong in Thy service and now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.