houses full of all sorts of good things, which you didn’t fill; water cisterns dug out, which you didn’t dig; vineyards and olive trees, which you didn’t plant — and you have eaten your fill;

It is a land of wheat and barley, grapevines, fig trees and pomegranates; a land of olive oil and honey;

Both are west of the Yarden, in the direction of the sunset, in the land of the Kena‘ani living in the ‘Aravah, across from Gilgal, near the pistachio trees of Moreh.

You must destroy all the places where the nations you are dispossessing served their gods, whether on high mountains, on hills, or under some leafy tree.

“You are not to plant any sort of tree as a sacred pole beside the altar of Adonai your God that you will make for yourselves.

An example would be if a man goes into the forest with his neighbor to cut wood and takes a stroke with the axe to fell a tree, but the head of the axe flies off the handle, hits his neighbor and kills him. Then he is to flee to one of these cities and live there.

“When, in making war against a town in order to capture it, you lay siege to it for a long time, you are not to destroy its trees, cutting them down with an axe. You can eat their fruit, so don’t cut them down. After all, are the trees in the field human beings, so that you have to besiege them too?

However, if you know that certain trees provide no food, you may destroy them and cut them down, in order to build siege-works against the town making war with you, until it falls.

(ii) “If someone has committed a capital crime and is put to death, then hung on a tree,

his body is not to remain all night on the tree, but you must bury him the same day, because a person who has been hanged has been cursed by God — so that you will not defile your land, which Adonai your God is giving you to inherit.

“If, as you are walking along, you happen to see a bird’s nest in a tree or on the ground with chicks or eggs, and the mother bird is sitting on the chicks or the eggs, you are not to take the mother with the chicks.

When you beat your olive tree, you are not to go back over the branches again; the olives that are left will be for the foreigner, the orphan and the widow.

You will have olive trees throughout your territory but not anoint yourself with the oil, because your olives will fall off unripe.

The bugs will inherit all your trees and the produce of your land.