Deuteronomy 20:10-20

Easy-to-Read Version

¹⁰ “When you go to attack a city, you must first offer peace to the people there. ¹¹ If they accept your offer and open their gates, all the people in that city will become your slaves and be forced to work for you. ¹² But if the city refuses to make peace with you and fights against you, you should surround the city. ¹³ And when the Lord your God lets you take the city, you must kill all the men in it. ¹⁴ But you may take for yourselves the women, the children, the cattle, and everything else in the city. You may use all these things. The Lord your God has given these things to you. ¹⁵ That is what you must do to all the cities that are very far from you—the cities that are not in the land where you will live.

¹⁶ “But when you take cities in the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you must kill everyone. ¹⁷ You must completely destroy all the people—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. The Lord your God has commanded you to do this. ¹⁸ So then they will not be able to teach you to sin against the Lord your God or to do any of the terrible things they do when they worship their gods.

¹⁹ “When you are making war against a city, you might surround that city for a long time. You must not cut down the fruit trees around that city. You may eat the fruit from these trees, but you must not cut them down. These trees are not the enemy, so don’t make war against them. ²⁰ But you may cut down the trees that you know are not fruit trees. You may use these trees to build weapons for making war against that city. You may use them until the city falls.