Rules of War in Deuteronomy

Dan McClellan Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Things are genocidally good today.

Dan McClellan Which is a troubling way to put it.

Dan Beecher It's not. Giveith and taketh away on that front. Things are good, and I'm looking forward to this discussion, but man, it's a doozy. We're doing a chapter and verse, and what a chapter it is.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher So, let's dive straight in with our chapter and verse. And boom, the chapter and verse is Deuteronomy 20, or the chapter is Deuteronomy 20, and good luck because, woo, we're about to have us some fun.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, it's a mess.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Deuteronomy means the second law. We know this was probably begun under the reign of King Josiah toward the end of the pre-exilic period, and it was kind of added to over the following centuries, and it's basically trying to prop up a Davidic line and the necessity of a Davidic king, and all this stuff. But one of the things that it does is it purports to be Moses' kind of farewell tour- ... before he goes off to wherever he goes off to, and he reviews an awful lot of the stuff that God told him and that he turned around and told Israel. Only when you compare it to all the other stuff from Genesis to Numbers, it differs in a lot of ways, and one of the main ways it differs is that it's really about a covenant that is being made between God and Israel. Only this covenant is framed in language that is very, very reminiscent of what are called Neo-Assyrian Vassal Treaties, and particularly those of Esarhaddon, and other emperors. And so, a lot of critical scholars, again, this is something probably written toward the end of the seventh century BCE, so that it would make use of the most authoritative kind of treaty literature of the seventh century BCE makes an awful lot of sense.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, it's talking about a time period that is several hundred years before these texts are being written. So, it's basically inventing a golden age in the past.

Dan Beecher Right. And it's not just talking about it, it's talking as though the author is in the midst of it.

Dan McClellan In that period.

Dan Beecher Right. It's talking as though this is a contemporary talking to the contemporaries of that time.

Dan McClellan Yes, and one of the giveaways that it is not from that time is the authors, particularly in the Deuteronomistic layers of other texts outside of Deuteronomy, will frequently say, "And then this happened, and then this happened, and to this day you can still go see that place."

Dan Beecher Oops.

Dan McClellan But here in Deuteronomy 20, we've got a series of rules about warfare.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan How to engage in warfare, and there are three main segments. The first one is verse one through nine, and then we have 10 through 14, and then we have 15 through 20, and all of them are very different, and they get increasingly disturbing- Yeah ... as we go through the chapter.

Dan Beecher Yeah, the first bit, one through nine is just like the priest is going to go out and address the troops and just- Yeah ... say, "Buck up, you guys." And there's some weird stuff that I didn't really understand about, like, "If your house isn't dedicated, you better go home- Yeah ... and dedicate it."

Dan McClellan It's basically put your house in order kind of stuff. So, the priest is out there to be like, "We are consecrated to go out and battle. Has anyone become engaged to a woman but not yet married her? He should go back to his house, lest he die in battle, and another marry her." And, at which point immediately everybody goes, "I'm out."

Dan Beecher Yeah, it feels like this is a comedy sketch where I could see Monty Python having this scene, and the priest is like- ... "If you haven't dedicated your house, you better go back to your house." And a bunch of guys are like, "Okay, I don't want to go to war." And then, "If you haven't married your betrothed person, better go do that." And then a bunch of other guys go.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And it's like, "Does anybody have any fruit on their trees? Because- Yeah ... if you haven't eaten your fruit, you got to go eat your fruit."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And, "Any of you scared? If you're scared, we don't need you."

Dan Beecher And then there's just one guy left on the battlefield ready to go.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then, verses 10 through 14 are rules about what to do when you go fight against a town.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And it's odd, but let's take a look. "When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace."

Dan Beecher That sounds good. That's a good start.

Dan McClellan It sounds good, but let's be clear, they're engaged in a campaign of conquest.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan They're not just out enjoying their day frolicking, when suddenly a town shows up, and it's like- Right ... cake or death. And you have to offer it peace. "If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor." So, the terms of peace are "Be subjugated to us."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "Become our corvée labor. Become enslaved to us."

Dan Beecher Right. Slave or death is- Yeah ... a much worse choice than cake.

Dan McClellan Yes. "I'll have cake, please." "Very well."

Dan Beecher Didn't realize there was going to be... Should've brought more cake.

Dan McClellan Yeah. "But if it does not accept your terms of peace and makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. And when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may, however, take as your plunder the women, the children, the livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you." And this is- Yeah ... and this is particularly disturbing. This is describing basically a genocide because at- Yeah ... at this time, these towns are basically individual people groups. These are- Yeah ... ethnic groups, and you're basically destroying them. And then I've heard apologists say, "Well, no, it's incorporating the women and the children into your family, giving them a life, allowing them to survive." That's still cultural genocide.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan This is what went on in the 19th century with indigenous peoples in the United States, where they would go kill a bunch of indigenous men, and frequently a lot of the women as well, and then they would take the children and just scatter them among White families- Right ... and put them in boarding schools and try to basically re-educate the indigeneity right out of them.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Try to make them imagine that they come from savage, uncivilized stock. And even the LDS church was deeply involved- Yeah ... with these programs with the United States government, and that is cultural genocide. You are erasing those identities. So this is not defensible.

Dan Beecher No.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher No. In no way is any part of it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher From here on in, there's nothing defensible.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah, no.

Dan Beecher As we progress through the rest of this text, it is not- Yeah. We're going to remain indefensible.

Dan McClellan And when you take as your plunder the women- Yeah ... they're sex slaves, basically.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan They're becoming your concubines, and you have more explicit descriptions of this, as well as precisely what process they should go through and what timeline you have to wait before you can actually go and sexually assault them. This is not ambiguous.

Dan Beecher And the way that it talks about the women and children- As property ... just in a list of properties- Right ... that it also includes livestock and dot, dot, dot, everything else.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher It is so dehumanized. It is just you get this property now.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And verses 15 through 18, I'm actually going to split the last segment into two itself. Verses 15 through 18 are usually agreed by scholars to be part of a secondary layer- Oh ... literary layer, that this has been added on later. Because when you read through from verse one all the way to verse 14, it's like, "Okay, here are rules for war. Here's what happens when you go out to conquest other cities." But then verse 15 qualifies everything that it has just said.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "Thus shall you treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of these nations here. But as for the towns of these peoples, that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance," in other words, verse 15 jumps in and says, "What I just talked about, that was only for the people who are not occupying the land of Canaan that the Lord your God is giving you."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "When it comes to the towns in the land of Canaan, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. Indeed, you shall annihilate them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God."

Dan Beecher And- Woof.

Dan McClellan Yes, indeed. And the NRSVUE has rendered annihilate, a verb, while the noun is herem, and this is kind of ritual slaughter of a people. And we find this- Oh, wow ... and this is a term that is used in the Mesha Inscription, and it's also known from some Sabean inscriptions. The Sabean people and language were an old South Arabian language and people who occupied deeper inland in Arabia. But that was the notion basically of ritual slaughter of a people. So in the previous verses, it was, "Kill all the men. They're of no use to us. They're only going to get in the way." "We will take and enjoy the women and the children because they can function as concubines, or we can raise them as our own, either enslaved population or our children."

Dan Beecher And they're unlikely to fight back or whatever.

Dan McClellan Right, and they're not going to fight back. But when it comes to herem, that's ritual slaughter. Everything must go.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's a fire sale, and you're not allowed to keep anything. And there are stories about God commanding herem, and then somebody holding onto some stuff, and then them having a very bad day- Right ... as a result. And there's an argument to make that what's going on here, because when we get in other parts of Deuteronomy, and particularly into Leviticus, once we get into the holiness code, you have this idea that the That all this purity stuff is basically to prevent you from desecrating, contaminating either God's holy precinct or the land of Israel. So you get these ideas that if you do all these things, then the land of Israel will vomit you out, just like it has done to the people who came before you. And so you have to make sure to avoid all this stuff, or you have to purge this evil from the land. And so the idea is these sins create a kind of metaphysical contamination that gets out on the land, and these impurities contaminate the land, and then the land is going to be like and vomit it out because the land can't take it.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And one of the things that some scholars suggest this herem idea is doing is saying, "These people are impure, and so in order to purify the land, they all must be annihilated." So it's basically ritual slaughter or human sacrifice as a means of purifying the land that you are now going to occupy, and oh, by the way, here are all the things you have to avoid doing so that you don't contaminate the land and require that you be purged from the land either. So I think that's an interesting way to look at this idea that the people who occupy this land, they all must go. They have to be ritually slaughtered.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I do want to push back a little bit on- Okay ... just that idea, just because there is an explicit reason given for the complete annihilation of all of these other people, which is so that they don't teach you their ways.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher So that they don't teach you their bad magic or whatever it is. And that's almost more nuts to me. Well, and- It's like, yeah, they could teach me, but just tell me what you want me to do, and I'll just not do the thing that they're doing, and I'll do that thing. How about that?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Do I have to kill them all? Can't they be alive, and I'll just not do the things that they're doing?

Dan McClellan Well, and that's kind of the rationalization that sidesteps the idea that this is ritual slaughter for the sake of human sacrifice that purifies the land. But- Yeah ... the women, you have other parts of the Hebrew Bible that discuss women corrupting their husbands.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Foreign women corrupting their husbands.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah, we've talked about that.

Dan McClellan But the children, you don't have to kill the babies because they have not yet been taught those things.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And also, the idea that it's everything that breathes, "You will not let anything that breathes remain alive," that's a command to kill livestock.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan You're not even allowed to take the animals, not because they're going to teach you to worship Baal. I think while we have these token rationalizations for what's going on, I think undergirding a lot of what we're talking about, and it comes through in different ways, in different parts of the text, depending on the authors, the editors, things like that. But I think underlying it is the notion that the land must be purged of the impure blood, for lack of a better word. It is pretty sick genocidal language that is going on here.

Dan Beecher And as if to add insult to that injury, because yeah, we're killing the livestock, we're killing anything that breathes, and then verse 19 comes in and goes, "But you stay away from those trees."

Dan McClellan Yeah. This is something that has been much debated by scholars, 19 and 20. "If you besiege a town for a long time, making war against it in order to take it, you must not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them. Although you may take food from them, you must not cut them down. Are trees in the field human beings that they should come under siege from you? You may destroy only the trees that you know do not produce food. You may cut them down for use in building siege works against the town that makes war with you, until it falls." So there are a lot of scholars who in the past who've said, "Okay, look, it was a practice of the Assyrians when they were doing their scorched earth campaign to cut down fruit-bearing trees," and particularly the ones in the region that would be important would be date palms and olive trees and stuff like that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Things that take five to 20 years to mature- Right ... but can then produce fruit for a century.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Those are very, very important resources. And so, a lot of scholars thought, okay, so what this is doing is looking at the neo-Assyrian siege tactics and saying, "Don't be like them." That is usually not taken so seriously these days. There's got to be something else going on here. And there are scholars who suggest that this is having to do with not destroying things that are producing fruit. So you've got other parts of Deuteronomy, where it's like, "Don't boil a kid in its mother's milk." And there's another part in Deuteronomy 22 where it talks about not destroying things that are bearing fruit.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Maybe that has something to do with this. Maybe it just has to do with trying to offer a tiny little token suggestion of humanity. However, it is pretty inhumane to be like, "Don't hurt the trees. The trees aren't people."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Why would you hurt the trees?

Dan Beecher Literally expressly saying, "They're not-" jerks like humans.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher They're just trees. They didn't do anything to you.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So it is an odd little attempt to try to qualify the genocidal instructions- Yeah ... that are going on here. But I think it demonstrates just the complexity of what's going on in the Book of Deuteronomy. This is something that was handed down for centuries, with people adding to it from time to time. And I think we probably have three very different segments, where you initially have, "Okay, here are the rules," and then somebody else coming in, "No, just the rules for those people over there.

Dan Beecher These people, we've got to kill them all."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then somebody coming in later and be like, "Hey, we can be humane about this. We can be civilized about this. Just don't cut down the fruit trees, okay?"

Dan Beecher Be cool with the trees, man.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I do remember, is it in Kings? 2 Kings, I think. We talked about the campaign against the Moabites.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it says, "Cut down every good tree."

Dan Beecher They cut down all of the trees when they're doing it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So it's not like the Israelites never did that.

Dan McClellan Right. And one of the arguments that scholars have made is, hey, maybe this is looking at 2 Kings 3. Ultimately, that campaign failed, and we know that it's because Chemosh rode the lightning into town and chased the invading force off. But maybe they were like, "Well, maybe it was because they cut down the trees, so let's just make it-" "Maybe if they had left the trees alone, it would've been fine." Yeah, so maybe that's what's going on here.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan I do have friends who are colleagues who listen to this podcast. If somebody has a better idea, Jacob Wright, who's been on our show- Mm-hmm ... he published a paper on this very passage. He makes a very erudite argument. But if anybody listening has a better idea, they're convinced they know why the fruit trees were to be left alone, I would love to hear the explanation.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Well, there you go, friends. Thank you so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of making this show happen, the best thing you can possibly do, the thing that actually literally sustains us and keeps us going, is become a patron of the show over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma, where you can get early access to an ad-free version of every episode of the show, as well as the after-party, which is bonus content for you that we do every week. And you get the warm, fuzzy feeling of helping us keep this thing alive. So that is a wonderful thing to do. Thanks to all of our patrons. Thanks also to Roger Gowdy for editing the show, and we'll talk to you again next week.

Dan McClellan Bye, everybody.