Deuteronomy 20:10-20

Laws of Warfare

¹⁰“When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace. ¹¹And if it agrees to make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your forced labor and serve you. ¹²However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. ¹³When the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword. ¹⁴However, the women, the children, the animals, and everything that is in the city, all of its spoils, you shall take as plunder for yourself; and you shall use the spoils of your enemies which the Lord your God has given you. ¹⁵This is what you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not of the cities of these nations nearby. ¹⁶Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave anything that breathes alive. ¹⁷Instead, you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, just as the Lord your God has commanded you, ¹⁸so that they will not teach you to do all the same detestable practices of theirs which they have done for their gods, by which you would sin against the Lord your God.

¹⁹“When you besiege a city for a long time, to make war against it in order to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by swinging an axe against them; for you may eat from them, so you shall not cut them down. For is the tree of the field a human, that it should be besieged by you? ²⁰Only the trees that you know are not fruit trees you shall destroy and cut down, so that you may construct siegeworks against the city that is making war against you until it falls.