Deuteronomy 20 Summary and Study Guide

An army is drawn up for battle, and the man who walks out in front of it is not a general. He is a priest, and he has come to talk the soldiers out of being afraid. This Deuteronomy 20 summary and study guide follows that address and the war law it opens.

Setting the Stage

Forty years earlier, Israel stood at the southern edge of Canaan and sent twelve men in to look at it. They came back talking about walled cities and about giants, and the nation was too frightened to go in (Deuteronomy 1:26-28). Fear cost them the land for a generation.

Their children are now camped on the plains of Moab with the same river still to cross. Since Deuteronomy 16:18, Moses has been appointing every office that will hold power after him: judges, a king, the priests, a prophet. Chapter 20 is the last of them, and it is the army. For where this speech sits in the book, see our Book of Deuteronomy Summary by Chapter.

Comprehensive Deuteronomy 20 Summary

Moses gives Israel a law for war before they own a field to defend, and it opens with fear. When Israel goes out and sees horses, chariots and an army larger than its own, it is not to be afraid, because the God who drowned Egypt’s chariots is going with them.

A priest speaks first. Four times he warns them off fear, and then he gives them the ground for it in three short clauses about what God will do in the battle.

Then the officers speak, and what they say makes the army smaller. Three men are sent home: the one whose new house still waits to be dedicated, the one whose vineyard still waits to be eaten from, and the one who is betrothed and still waiting to be married. Each time the reason is the same. Another man must not end up with what God gave that soldier.

Then the officers speak again, and the frightened man goes home too, so that his fear stays out of the ranks. Only after all that leaving are captains appointed over the men who stayed.

For a city far from the land, Israel must proclaim peace before it does anything else. A city that opens its gates is put under tribute, which meant paying and working for Israel rather than being destroyed by it. A city that fights is besieged, and when it falls its fighting men are killed while its women, children, livestock and goods are spared and taken.

The cities of Canaan are the exception, and Moses states why: leaving those peoples in place would pull Israel into the worship of their gods and into the sins that went with it.

The chapter ends with an axe and a tree. Besieging armies of that period needed timber for ramps, towers and battering rams, so Israel may cut what it needs from the trees that bear no food, and never from the ones that feed people.

One Word Summary

• Restraint: almost every command in the chapter limits what a victorious army may do.
• Courage: the first order given is to stop being afraid.
• Limits: who fights, what is offered, who is spared, what may be cut.

In One Sentence

Moses tells Israel not to fear a larger enemy because God fights for them, sends home the soldiers with unfinished blessings or failing courage, orders peace offered to distant cities before any siege, excepts the cities of Canaan because their worship would corrupt Israel, and forbids the army to cut down fruit trees.

Theme of Deuteronomy 20

Deuteronomy 20 is about God governing the one place men assume nothing can be governed. War is where restraint usually dies first, and this chapter puts a limit on every stage of it, including the one place it lifts the limits, where Moses names the Canaanite cities and gives his reason for them.

Running alongside that are two more ideas the chapter keeps returning to: courage that rests on God’s presence rather than on numbers, and God’s care for the ordinary life the war is being fought to make possible. The house, the vineyard and the bride are not distractions from the campaign. They are the point of it.

Deuteronomy 20 Outline

• Deuteronomy 20:1: Moses tells Israel not to fear an enemy with more horses, chariots and men, because the LORD who brought them out of Egypt is with them.
• Deuteronomy 20:2-4: The priest comes forward before the battle and tells the army that God goes with them to fight for them and save them.
• Deuteronomy 20:5-7: The officers send home the man with an undedicated house, the man with an unharvested vineyard, and the man betrothed but not yet married.
• Deuteronomy 20:8: The officers speak again and send home the man who is afraid, so that his fear does not spread.
• Deuteronomy 20:9: When the officers have finished speaking, captains are appointed over the men who remain.
• Deuteronomy 20:10-11: Israel must proclaim peace to a city before attacking it, and a city that opens is put under tribute and serves Israel.
• Deuteronomy 20:12-14: A city that refuses peace is besieged, its fighting men are killed, and its women, children, livestock and goods are taken as spoil.
• Deuteronomy 20:15: Moses states that these rules govern the cities far off, which are not the cities of the nations in the land.
• Deuteronomy 20:16-18: In the cities of Canaan nothing that breathes is spared, so that those nations cannot teach Israel their worship.
• Deuteronomy 20:19-20: In a long siege Israel may cut down trees that bear no food to build siegeworks, but must not put an axe to the trees that feed people.

The Priest’s Address Before the Battle

Israel is lined up for battle, and the man who steps out to speak is a priest. His address is short, and Moses supplies the wording.

“Hear, O Israel, ye approach this day unto battle against your enemies: let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do not tremble, neither be ye terrified because of them; For the LORD your God is he that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.”

Deuteronomy 20:3-4

Listen, Israel. You are going into battle today. Let your heart hold steady, and refuse fear, trembling and terror in front of them, because the LORD who is your God goes with you, fights your enemies for you, and rescues you.

The address has three parts:

• The summons. “Hear, O Israel” is the same call Moses used when he gave Israel the Ten Commandments (Deuteronomy 5:1) and when he gave them the command to love God with everything they had (Deuteronomy 6:4-5). What follows is being put on the same level as those.
• The four commands. Do not faint, do not fear, do not tremble, do not be terrified. Four ways of saying one thing, to men who were about to feel all four.
• The three reasons. God goes with them. God fights for them. God saves them. Every reason has God as its subject and Israel as the one it is done for.

Moses says “the priest,” meaning a priest appointed for this duty rather than the high priest, and Numbers 1:47-53 leaves the Levites out of the count of Israel’s fighting men altogether. Jewish tradition later gave this man a title, the anointed of the war. The priest carried no sword, and he is the one God sends to steady the men who did.

Observations from Deuteronomy 20

The threat named three times is losing the blessing, not losing life (20:5-7)

Each of the three exemptions ends the same way: “lest he die in the battle, and another man dedicate it,” “and another man eat of it,” “and another man take her.” Death appears in every clause as the risk, and the loss God guards against is the one that follows it: a man forfeiting the house, the harvest or the marriage he was given before he ever enjoyed it.

To dedicate a house meant taking possession of it with a celebration, and the same word is used later for the dedication of Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 8:63) and of the rebuilt wall of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 12:27).

The vineyard release was the longest of the three, because Leviticus 19:23-25 kept the fruit of a new planting off the table for three years and gave the fourth year’s crop to the LORD. Israel fights so that Israel can live in the land. God keeps the war from swallowing the men who are about to start living there.

The officers speak twice, not once (20:5-8)

Verse 8 opens, “And the officers shall speak further unto the people.” That “further” marks a second announcement, not a fourth item on one list. The first speech releases men whose blessing is unfinished, and there is no shame in it.

The second releases the man whose courage has failed, and it gives a different reason: “lest his brethren’s heart faint as well as his heart.” One speech protects the soldier. The other protects the army from him.

The most repeated order in this war chapter is “return” (20:5-8)

The word “return” appears four times in the chapter, in verses 5, 6, 7 and 8, and every one of them sends a soldier home. Israel is standing on the edge of a conquest, and the instruction Moses repeats more than any other is the one that empties the ranks. Whatever this army was going to be, its size was never the point. The men who marched were the ones with nothing pulling at them and nothing failing inside them.

One verse holds the two war laws apart (20:15)

“Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations.” Everything Moses has just said about offering peace and sparing women and children applies to cities outside the land. What follows in verses 16 to 18 applies only to the nations inside it. Verse 15 is a boundary, and reading the chapter without it turns a bounded command into a general policy it never was.

Difficult Verses Explained

Did God Command Genocide in Deuteronomy 20:16-18?

God commanded the destruction of six named Canaanite nations, in one land, at one point in history, and Moses gives the reason himself in verse 18: their worship would pass into Israel and Israel would sin against the LORD. The ground he gives is religion rather than race, and the list itself names six peoples rather than the usual seven, leaving off the Girgashites of Deuteronomy 7:1.

Leviticus 18:21-30 lists what that worship involved, and Deuteronomy 12:31 names the worst of it plainly: “for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.” Those nations burned their own children alive as an act of worship. Scripture adds four things that bound the command.

God waited roughly four centuries before acting, “for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Genesis 15:16). Moses tells Israel plainly that they receive the land in spite of their own stubbornness rather than as a reward for goodness (Deuteronomy 9:4-6). Verse 15 limits the command to that land, and no later generation extended it.

And exceptions happened inside the command itself: Rahab and her household were spared (Joshua 6:22-25), and the Gibeonites lived (Joshua 9:23-27). Centuries later Solomon was still collecting tribute from surviving Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites (2 Chronicles 8:7). None of that makes the words gentler than they are. “Save alive nothing that breatheth” means what it says, and it is a sentence of judgment carried out by an army.

What Does “The Tree of the Field Is Man’s Life” Mean in Deuteronomy 20:19?

The parenthesis in verse 19 is the hardest line in the chapter to translate, and the difficulty is one vowel mark in the Hebrew. Read one way, it says the tree of the field is man’s life, meaning the tree is what keeps people alive, which is how the King James renders it. Read the other way, it becomes a question: is the tree of the field a man, that it should be besieged by you?

The Greek Old Testament and most modern English versions read it as a question, while the Aramaic Targums and the Latin Vulgate turn it into a flat denial that a tree is a man at all. Every reading arrives at the same command: leave the axe off what feeds people, however much faster it would win the siege. Jewish teachers took the ban wider than trees, reading “thou shalt not destroy” as a rule against wasting anything useful.

Does “Smite Every Male” in Deuteronomy 20:13 Include Civilians?

Verse 13 concerns a city that was offered peace and chose war, and many Bible teachers read “every male” as the fighting men, since in that world every able man carried arms. The next verse supports that reading, because it immediately spares the women, the children and the livestock, which is the opposite of what invading armies of the period normally did.

The verse is still hard, and softening it would be dishonest. What verse 14 does is stop the army the moment the fighting ends, which keeps the command well short of a licence for slaughter.

Common Misunderstandings

• That verse 8 shames the frightened soldier. Moses attaches no penalty, no rebuke and no loss of standing to going home afraid. The reason he gives points away from the man and toward everyone near him: “lest his brethren’s heart faint as well as his heart.” One failing heart could empty the ranks around it, so the officers move him out of them.
• That verses 5 to 7 are advice about keeping your priorities straight. Moses is not telling the soldier to sort out his life. He is telling the officers to release him. The command is aimed at the army, not at the man.
• That Deuteronomy 20 makes holy war a Christian category. The New Testament puts the church’s fight somewhere else entirely: “we wrestle not against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12), and “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal” (2 Corinthians 10:4). Paul says the Christian’s struggle is against spiritual powers rather than people, and its tools are not physical ones.
• That every war Israel fought looked like verses 16 to 18. Complete destruction is rare in Scripture, called for at Jericho (Joshua 6:21), at Hazor (Joshua 11:10-11), at Zephath (Judges 1:17) and against the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:3), and hardly anywhere else. Israel’s ordinary war law is the one in verses 10 to 15, and it begins with an offer of peace.

Christ Connection

Israel’s courage before a battle does not come from a general and it does not come from a head count. It comes from a priest, and what the priest hands them is a word about God’s presence. The New Testament puts a priest in the same place for the believer.

Jesus is “a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens,” and because of Him we may “come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:14-16). Hebrews also calls Him “the captain of their salvation” (Hebrews 2:10), which joins the two offices Deuteronomy 20 keeps apart. In Israel the priest spoke and the captains led. In Christ the same person does both.

The second connection is the order of the chapter. Before Israel may lay a hand on a city, it must proclaim peace to it (Deuteronomy 20:10), and a city that answers in peace comes under Israel and keeps its life. God deals with sinners in that order. Paul writes, “as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20).

God Himself is the one making the appeal, and He makes it before He judges. Ephesians says Christ “came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh,” and that those who answered became “fellowcitizens with the saints” (Ephesians 2:17, 19), which means the ones who were furthest away were brought right inside. The distant city that answers in peace ends up inside the people it was about to fight.

When, Where, and Why

• When: The first day of the eleventh month of the fortieth year after Israel left Egypt (Deuteronomy 1:3), in the last weeks of Moses’ life and shortly before Israel crossed the Jordan.
• Where: The plains of Moab, east of the Jordan and across from Canaan (Deuteronomy 1:5; Numbers 22:1). Israel is standing outside the land, close enough to see it, with every battle still ahead of them.
• Why: Israel was about to become a nation with borders, and a nation with borders fights. Moses gives them the limits before they have the power, and he grounds every limit in the God who was going with them rather than in their own restraint.

Key Verses

“When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest horses, and chariots, and a people more than thou, be not afraid of them: for the LORD thy God is with thee, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 20:1)

When you go out to fight and you see that the enemy has more horses, more chariots and more men than you do, do not be afraid of them, because the LORD your God is with you, and He is the one who brought you out of Egypt. Moses does not deny the enemy’s advantage. He answers it with something Israel had already seen God do.

“For the LORD your God is he that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.”

Deuteronomy 20:4

The LORD your God is the one going with you, to fight your enemies on your behalf and to rescue you. Three short clauses carry the whole chapter’s confidence, and every one of them has God doing the work.

“And the officers shall speak further unto the people, and they shall say, What man is there that is fearful and fainthearted? let him go and return unto his house, lest his brethren’s heart faint as well as his heart.”

Deuteronomy 20:8

The officers were to say next: is there anyone here who is frightened and losing his nerve? Let him go home, so that his “brethren,” the men standing in the ranks beside him, do not lose heart the way he has lost his. God would rather have a smaller army than a discouraged one, and Gideon later ran this exact test and lost 22,000 of his 32,000 men to it (Judges 7:3).

“When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.”

Deuteronomy 20:10

To come “nigh” is to come close, so the command is that when you get near a city you mean to attack, you offer it peace before you do anything else. This is the standing rule for every campaign outside the land, and it puts an offer of terms ahead of every siege Israel would ever lay.

Key Lessons from Deuteronomy 20

• Fear is answered by remembering what God has already done, not by talking yourself into bravery (Deuteronomy 20:1).
• God had the army thinned before it fought, because Israel’s victory was staked on His presence rather than on its numbers (Deuteronomy 20:1-9).
• God cares about the ordinary life His people are fighting for, and He protects the house, the harvest and the marriage that are still unfinished (Deuteronomy 20:5-7).
• One soldier’s failing courage could empty the ranks around him, so Moses had the officers release him rather than rebuke him (Deuteronomy 20:8).
• Israel had to proclaim terms before it laid a single siege, so the first thing a threatened city heard was an offer rather than an army (Deuteronomy 20:10).
• Even an army in a long siege was forbidden the fruit trees, because the land had to survive the war being fought over it (Deuteronomy 20:19-20).

To go deeper into the lessons from this chapter, read our full study: Lessons from Deuteronomy 20.

Bible Study Questions

1. According to Deuteronomy 20:1, what reason does Moses give Israel for not fearing an enemy with more horses and chariots?
2. Why does a priest, rather than a commander, address the army in verses 2 to 4, and what does that say about who was expected to win the battle?
3. What three situations release a man from military service in verses 5 to 7, and what is the stated reason each time?
4. Verse 8 releases a fourth man for a different reason. What is it, and who is that release protecting?
5. What must Israel do before attacking a city that is far off (verse 10), and how does that differ from the command in verses 16 to 18?
6. Read verse 18. What reason does Moses give for the destruction of the Canaanite nations, and how does that reason shape the way you read verses 16 and 17?
7. Deuteronomy 20:19 forbids Israel to cut down fruit trees during a siege. What does that command suggest about how God wanted His people to think about the future?
8. Where do you find it hardest to trust that God goes with you, and what has He already done that answers it?

Frequently Asked Questions

Deuteronomy 20, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference.

1 When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest horses, and chariots, and a people more than thou, be not afraid of them: for the LORD thy God is with thee, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

2 And it shall be, when ye are come nigh unto the battle, that the priest shall approach and speak unto the people,

3 And shall say unto them, Hear, O Israel, ye approach this day unto battle against your enemies: let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do not tremble, neither be ye terrified because of them;

4 For the LORD your God is he that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.

5 And the officers shall speak unto the people, saying, What man is there that hath built a new house, and hath not dedicated it? let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man dedicate it.

6 And what man is he that hath planted a vineyard, and hath not yet eaten of it? let him also go and return unto his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man eat of it.

7 And what man is there that hath betrothed a wife, and hath not taken her? let him go and return unto his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man take her.

8 And the officers shall speak further unto the people, and they shall say, What man is there that is fearful and fainthearted? let him go and return unto his house, lest his brethren’s heart faint as well as his heart.

9 And it shall be, when the officers have made an end of speaking unto the people, that they shall make captains of the armies to lead the people.

10 When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.

11 And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.

12 And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it:

13 And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword:

14 But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.

15 Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations.

16 But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:

17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee:

18 That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the LORD your God.

19 When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them: for thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down (for the tree of the field is man’s life) to employ them in the siege:

20 Only the trees which thou knowest that they be not trees for meat, thou shalt destroy and cut them down; and thou shalt build bulwarks against the city that maketh war with thee, until it be subdued.