Deuteronomy 20: Worst War Manual Ever?

I was just saying this, but it's my nephew! All right. Hello. Welcome. Happy afternoon. Happy Sabbath. Deuteronomy. How's everybody doing? This has been so exciting for me. This has been a really neat thing to lead up to the feast, and I'm so appreciative of it. I've gotten a lot of neat study out of doing Deuteronomy this year, especially, leading up to the feast. I talked to a few people who started strong. When I talked to them about it, I'd see them kind of hang their heads a little bit, and they kind of dropped out at some point or another. I would encourage you to stick with it and hang in there. Also, try to...don't be too hard on yourself. Just jump back in. There are things that are complex where you might have questions. Even going back to Nehemiah's time, when they were doing what we were doing, which is reading the law at the feast, they had questions. They needed a running Bible commentary to catch them up on the things that had changed culturally. We're separated a long way, culturally, linguistically, and in the style of the way that we tell stories. So we do need those helps to go through. Today, I would like to look at the reading that we just did yesterday, Deuteronomy 20, and dig into that a little bit and see if we can hear some of the music again that maybe we feel like we're missing sometimes, whenever we read it, as modern people. So I'd like to look first, just kind of step back and look at the structure that most people say Deuteronomy has. Most of them, they see three speeches that Moses makes for the most part. They're separated, and then appendices, some things at the end. And we are right here. We're in the middle of the big speech in the middle, the one that's famous for most of the laws, the big sets of laws that we get. We're right in the middle of that right now. And in particular, in chapter 20, we're in what some people call the War Manual. But is it really? Is it really a War Manual? Is it going to help you figure out how to outfox your enemies? Or is it going to tell you about supply lines or that kind of thing? If that's what it is, it's kind of a lousy War Manual, honestly. That does not seem to be what this chapter is about. And what I'd like to propose is to look at it as having this thesis. Israel's God is the God of life and peace. And that's what Deuteronomy 20 is about. But first, we've got to zoom out a little bit and look again at these structures. So we're going to look first at where it is in the book. Now, in this big speech that Moses is giving, at the beginning, you'll remember we had the retelling of the Ten Commandments. They're called in the Bible the Ten Words in Deuteronomy 5. Well, for about the last half century or so, more and more Old Testament scholars have been zeroing in on the 21 chapters after that. And noticing the groupings of the laws seem to be specifically chosen to associate with the Ten Commandments. And the groupings seem to be the Ten Commandments in order from Deuteronomy 6 through Deuteronomy 26. So that's very interesting. That kind of has some implications for it. It means that when we read the Ten Commandments, we're not necessarily just seeing these words, but maybe they're just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe they are the smallest way of expressing ten expansive ethics for life that then get unpacked by Moses through God's inspiration over the next 21 chapters.

And so perhaps one way we can think about that is the Ten Commandments is doubling as the Table of Contents for Deuteronomy 6 through 26. And that's very interesting and useful because that means if these 21 chapters and the Ten Commandments are mutually illuminating each other, one is a commentary on the other and vice versa, that can help us in times where something is not quite clear in a law or kind of a check for the way that we read the Ten Commandments to see how they were reading the Ten Commandments. So it gives us another tool for letting the Bible interpret the Bible. So I wanted to vet this idea, and so I looked at a number of prominent Old Testament scholars who have laid out this plan and just kind of line them up next to each other because I thought, okay, well, do they even agree on it? That would be a good sign if there's something here. And I would just want to point out, actually, I see Dr. Moore here. He recently told me, cite your sources. And I don't have time to cite all the sources he's came from, but since he's here, I'll name off the scholars, at least, that are here. This is Michael Lefebvre, John Walton, Bruce Bagus, Walter Kaiser, James B. Jordan, Peter Leithart, Stephen Kaufman, who's the one who reinvigorated this idea about half a century ago, Georg Braulich, Christopher J. H. Wright, and Gary Millar. And the two things I want you to notice here, every single one of these is a little bit different. None of them are exactly the same. But they're all pretty much the same. In fact, there's a lot of places where there's unanimity on exactly the verse where these dividers are, where you have a section in Deuteronomy that's associated with this commandment, and then to the next one. And I would encourage you to try this yourself. Before you look up anybody else, just try it yourself.

When I did this, mine was different than all of these, but it also looked pretty much like all of these. So it seemed like there is something here. So why am I talking about this for Deuteronomy 20? Well, this is where we are. We're smack dab in the middle of the sixth commandment section, You Shall Not Kill. So that's interesting. That is an interesting indicator of how we should be reading the War Manual.

So perhaps we should be expecting a little bit less Sun Tzu and a little bit more Geneva Conventions for what this is about. We are talking about human life here and how we deal with it. That's the first thing. Second thing, this section has these military exemptions in it. If you haven't already, you can turn to Deuteronomy 20. That's where we're going to be staying here. And it's got these military exemptions, which we'll get to. Chapter 20 starts off, when you go out to battle against your enemies and see horses and chariots and people more numerous than you, don't be afraid of them.

God's with you. You are in God's army. When you go out, they're going to have drones and cruise missiles and tanks. That's the ancient equivalent of those things. And you're going to go out with your smaller citizen army. But he says, don't remember, you are in God's army. God has his heavenly hosts. You're the equivalent on earth of that. You're in God's army. The God who brought Pharaoh to his knees. The God who dumped the whole Red Sea on top of his army. And he's the one who fights the battle. And also, there's an implication here.

If we're in a situation like this, God must have chosen the battle. If you have an Israelite, greedy king is going out and waging a war of empire, this is not going to work. So this presumes God chose this battle for his ends, and you're doing his errand here. But then something really shocking happens in this chapter. We go out, we're on the verge of battle with this far superior enemy.

And the first thing we do is dismiss maybe most of our best guys. Why would you do that? If you're a military planner, you always want more, more, more. It's completely against the war ethic that happens both in imperial war and even just when you've been attacked. In World War II, everything was about the war effort. Everybody was a part of the war effort. But something really different is happening here. You've got these three speeches, and they end up creating a kind of bracket that highlights the center by bringing up the whole aspect of fear and then coming back to that at the end.

And it has these three in the middle. Make sure I don't move that there. And there's something that unites them. There's an Edenic ideal here. And it is really kind of shocking because God's saying on the verge of battle, He's saying, you know what is more important than even this battle right now? Enjoying that house that you just built.

Enjoying that vineyard that you planted. Enjoying your marriage. That's so important that we're going to send those guys back to do that in the midst of this battle. It's just completely against the way that we would think. But there's something more that unites these phrases. When you talk about house and vineyard and betrothal, these are concepts that are closely networked together. They're wired together in what some people call the Eden motif. It starts in the Garden of Eden and it winds through Noah's vineyard and it goes to the Promised Land, which is a new kind of that.

It involves the Sabbath. It involves later on Christ living in us, the Millennium, the New Jerusalem, the Temple, the Tabernacle. All of these things are linked by language where these kinds of phrases show up and put us in that mindset. We are not like man's war-like cultures and empires. We're building a new Eden here in the Promised Land, in this time in Deuteronomy.

If I could take a moment just to...there's hundreds of these connections between, say, even just the Promised Land and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But if I could just talk about one for us to think about. Remember when God sent Adam and Eve out of the Garden. He sent them eastward out of the Garden and he placed these two carobim there and this flaming whirling sword to block their way back in. That was Genesis 3.

If you remember Joshua 3, a pillar of fire and cloud leads the Israelites right up to the border of the good land. Presumably, that's where you never see it again. That's where it leads. It leads them up to that border and something really interesting happens. The Ark. God has the Ark moved into the Jordan River and set in the middle of the Jordan River.

Then all of the people file by that Ark and then it gets picked up and moved out. First in, last out. These people are moving into God's good land westward and they are walking by the carobim. Those carobim, as they file by it, they're not blocking their way into the land. They might as well be holding back those heaps of water up the stream of the Jordan there.

It's fascinating. What are they brought into the land to do? They're brought in to be fruitful and multiply and subdue it from the enemies of the Lord. There are all these ties in here that would not be missed by somebody who had memorized the Torah. When you get brought back to a point here, you see that God is slamming the brakes on the military industrial complex with this kind of picture that he's introducing.

We're starting in a war context, but it keeps pushing us back to the Edenic ideal. Wars must be fought. They are necessary. But God fights our battles and we continue to look ahead to living at peace in God's presence. Third thing I want to highlight. I thought I'd have a clock on here, but I didn't, so hopefully I'm not getting too far behind here. Quickly, the fruit trees at the end of Deuteronomy 20. What is up with the fruit trees?

Why are we told not to cut them down? There's a little bit of a textual thing here that's difficult. It's not a text-critical issue. It's just the phrase in Hebrew is a little confusing. It's something like, mankind are trees of the field. Or are mankind trees of the field? The New King James goes one way. It adds the word food and suggests that, okay, we're talking about the trees are food.

Most other translations go back to an ancient tradition, interpreting it as, are the trees people? Are the trees human that you should attack them? That they should come under siege by you? Either way, it kind of doesn't matter for what I want to highlight in this, which is that some kind of interesting delineation is being made between people and trees here. It's just, if you're reading along here, this is the war code. If you're a military commander, there's a lot of things on your list you probably would like to know from God ahead of fruit trees.

So it's kind of a surprising intrusion, in a way, into the story. It's worth asking a question about. On top of that, what you do with the fruit trees? I like fruit. You like fruit. If we're coming in here, capturing them seems like it would be a good idea. Usually, Deuteronomy is not so concerned with, hey, don't trip over your shoelaces. It's not so concerned with, well, don't make this rookie mistake. It's usually concerned with showing you the mind of God, showing you in some way how God thinks. So it's worth asking, is there something more happening here with these fruit trees?

We need to remember that the Promised Land was meant to be a new Eden. Or maybe how the Israelites might have thought about it more likely is that the Eden story was like a proto-Promised Land that's setting up their expectations for what they're supposed to do. And in that Eden situation, the command to Adam and Eve was to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth, but also to tend the garden.

And so that leaves you with this picture that we're like, we're going to subdue the earth by pushing the boundaries of order, the boundaries of the garden, outward to the ends of the earth. And so when the Israelites are contemplating this, and they're moving out, if they're annexing this far land and extending the boundary of the good land to it, you would expect them to have respect for the fruit trees of the land.

And so what I'm talking about here is, as you meditate on this, you want the Bible to interpret the Bible. You always come back to that. And so often in the Old Testament, you'll get a portrait painted, and it'll be painted with details that come from a previous thing that have happened in the Bible. And you layer them on top of each other, and you say, where have I seen this before?

Have I been here before? And so I really like this. This is a bit of speculation, but I really like this insight from Gary North from his Deuteronomy commentary. He observes that when a city is under siege in the ancient world, that city is cut off from its sources of life. It gradually becomes a place of death that is in a prison, while outside is where life is. And in this case, you've got...if you just look back at the scene that has now been painted by these verses, we've got death raining inside the city, and we have their access to the fruit trees that they previously enjoyed, their trees of life, their streams of water.

They are blocked from that by the armies of the Lord who stands between them. Come on! That's interesting. It's very interesting that that's the picture that's painted there. And what happens there? They are offered terms of peace. They are given a choice between life and death. It's the same choice that Israel was given between Gerizim and Ibal when they came into the good land. It's the same choice Adam and Eve were given in the garden between this tree and that tree. If these people under siege, if they make peace with God and his army, they'll have life and they will have access to those trees again.

They'll be laborers to Israel, but even that gives them a certain set of human rights under a lot of different Israelite laws that they might not get under any kind of empire. And that's to say nothing about the fact that they might say, boy, these people are wise. Their God is near.

Their laws are just, and they could even convert. You could become an Israelite if they got circumcised. And that could move them eventually to the same brother status under the law. So God is the God of life and peace. That's the main idea I want to get across here. We saw it in the literary structure of the book where this chapter falls within Deuteronomy, within Deuteronomy 6-26.

It's promoted by those military exemptions, which just keep pushing us back to that eat-and-ideal, and then the choice between life and death, signaled by these fruit trees. As God's army prevents access to those who don't align with Him, but we'll allow it. We'll allow peace again with those who align themselves with God. Deuteronomy 20 is a manual for life and peace.