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Catholic Commentary
Laws of War for Distant Cities
10When you draw near to a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace to it.11It shall be, if it gives you answer of peace and opens to you, then it shall be that all the people who are found therein shall become forced laborers to you, and shall serve you.12If it will make no peace with you, but will make war against you, then you shall besiege it.13When Yahweh your God delivers it into your hand, you shall strike every male of it with the edge of the sword;14but the women, the little ones, the livestock, and all that is in the city, even all its plunder, you shall take for plunder for yourself. You may use the plunder of your enemies, which Yahweh your God has given you.15Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far off from you, which are not of the cities of these nations.
Deuteronomy 20:10–15 prescribes Israel's warfare protocol with distant cities: first offer peace, and if accepted, enslave the population; if rejected, besiege the city and kill adult males while sparing women, children, and livestock for plunder. This graduated law applies only to distant nations, not Canaanite cities, and establishes that peace must precede military action.
Before the sword, always the call for peace — even warfare has rules, and God demands his people offer surrender before slaughter.
Verse 14 — Proportionate Benefit and the Sparing of Non-Combatants The explicit protection of women, children, livestock, and property from destruction is significant. In the herem ("ban") legislation applicable to Canaanite cities (vv. 16–18), total destruction is commanded. Here, for distant cities, the rules are different — more restrained. Women and children are taken captive but not killed. This graduated moral framework — stricter rules for the holy land's purification, more limited rules for distant war — shows that the Deuteronomic law is not a blanket license for violence but a carefully differentiated legal code. The phrase "which Yahweh your God has given you" reminds Israel that even plunder is a gift and therefore carries accountability.
Verse 15 — The Territorial Limit The explicit restriction — "cities which are very far off from you, which are not of the cities of these nations" — is the passage's hermeneutical key. This law applies only to cities outside Canaan. The theological rationale for the harsher Canaanite laws (given in vv. 16–18) is the prevention of religious contamination. These distant-city rules, by contrast, are closer to a universal natural-law code of warfare: offer peace, escalate proportionately, spare non-combatants where possible. The Torah itself distinguishes between what is specific to Israel's unique covenantal situation and what approaches a universal moral norm.
Typological and Spiritual Senses Origen (Homilies on Joshua) famously reads Israel's military campaigns as the soul's warfare against sin. The command to offer peace first becomes, in the allegorical sense, the Christian's obligation to seek reconciliation and conversion before entering into the "warfare" of correction or judgment. Ambrose of Milan (De Officiis 1.27) drew directly on these verses in constructing his ethics of war, insisting that peace must always be the goal and the first offer. The city that refuses peace and is besieged becomes a type of the hardened heart that resists grace — and which must ultimately be overcome by the siege-works of prayer, fasting, and word.
Catholic tradition brings three distinct lenses to this morally complex passage that non-Catholic readings often lack.
1. The Just War Tradition as Organic Development St. Augustine (Contra Faustum 22.74) was the first to argue systematically that this Deuteronomic passage is not evidence of divine cruelty but the seed of what would become the ius ad bellum: the requirement that war be a last resort, preceded by every reasonable offer of peace. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 40) codified this into the three conditions of just war — legitimate authority, just cause, right intention — all of which are nascent in Deuteronomy 20. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2309) echoes this inheritance explicitly, listing "all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective" as a condition for legitimate defense. Verse 10's mandatory peace offer is precisely this principle in embryonic form.
2. The Hermeneutics of Development The Church's reading of difficult Old Testament passages follows the principle articulated at the Second Vatican Council (Dei Verbum §15): "the books of the Old Testament… contain matters imperfect and provisional." The Church does not read these laws as eternal moral ideals but as progressive revelations that God permitted within the moral horizon of a particular people, pointing toward the fuller light of Christ. Pope Benedict XVI's Verbum Domini (§42) calls for reading the "dark passages" of Scripture with a Christological key, recognizing that what was tolerated in Moses is fulfilled and surpassed in the Sermon on the Mount.
3. The Patristic Allegorical Tradition Origen and Gregory of Nyssa consistently read Joshua's and Israel's wars as the interior warfare of the soul. The cities that must be taken are the fortresses of sin; the "males" put to the sword are the active, rational powers of vice; the women and children represent the soul's disordered affections, which are to be captured and redirected rather than destroyed. This is not an evasion of the literal sense but its fulfillment — the spiritual battle that literal warfare foreshadows.
This passage challenges contemporary Catholics to resist two opposite errors: sanitizing Scripture's difficulty, or weaponizing it to justify violence.
The mandatory peace offer of verse 10 is a concrete, practical model for conflict at every level — from international relations to parish disputes to family estrangement. Catholic Social Teaching's consistent prioritization of dialogue and negotiation before coercion is not a modern liberal invention; it is rooted in this ancient divine command. Before any escalation, shālôm must be spoken first.
For the individual Catholic, the Fathers' allegorical reading offers a sharp spiritual practice: identify the "distant cities" of persistent sin in your own soul. The law requires you first to offer peace — to seek honest self-examination and the sacrament of reconciliation — before waging the harsh interior warfare of penance. Rushing to severe self-mortification without first honestly naming what needs to change is the spiritual equivalent of besieging a city without calling for its surrender.
Finally, the passage's frank acknowledgment that warfare has rules — that even enemies have protections — calls Catholics to advocate concretely for international humanitarian law as an expression of natural law, a direct fruit of this biblical tradition.
Commentary
Verse 10 — The Obligation to Offer Peace The passage opens with a remarkable constraint: before any military engagement with a distant city, Israel must proclaim peace to it (Hebrew: qārāʾ shālôm, literally "call out shalom"). This is not merely a tactical maneuver but a legal-moral obligation embedded in holy war theology. Shālôm is far more than a ceasefire — it is the fullness of covenantal right-order. The initiative of peace must always come from Israel's side, regardless of the enemy's anticipated response. This verse alone disrupts any reading of Old Testament warfare as glorifying aggression; the divine law checks the warrior's impulse at the outset.
Verse 11 — Peaceful Submission and Forced Labor If the city accepts, its population becomes mas — forced laborers or tribute-workers (the same Hebrew word used for the labor gangs Solomon later assembled from Canaan's remnant peoples; cf. 1 Kings 9:21). While this outcome strikes modern readers as harsh, within the ancient Near Eastern context it was the merciful alternative to slaughter. The Deuteronomic law is not endorsing slavery as an ideal but regulating an existing institution to limit its worst excesses. The city retains its population, its families are not destroyed, and economic life continues — all preferable to annihilation. Catholic interpreters, following the tradition of reading the literal sense as a foundation for deeper meaning, recognize here the pattern of mercy as the first word of every divine encounter.
Verse 12 — The Besieged City If the city refuses peace and chooses war, Israel is then permitted to besiege it. The passive construction — "if it will make no peace" — places moral responsibility for the escalation on the city's leadership. Israel does not initiate aggression; it responds. This juridical structure anticipates the ius ad bellum categories later developed in Catholic Just War doctrine: the war is defensive in character even when it takes the form of offense, because the refusal of reasonable peace terms constitutes an act of aggression.
Verse 13 — Divine Sovereignty Over the Outcome "When Yahweh your God delivers it into your hand" — the victory is never attributed to Israel's military prowess. The theological grammar is crucial: God is the agent, Israel the instrument. The striking of "every male with the edge of the sword" reflects the ancient practice of eliminating a city's fighting-age population to ensure the war does not re-ignite. Morally troubling as this is to modern readers, the Church Fathers consistently read such passages through the lens of spiritual warfare: the enemies of God's people are, at the allegorical level, the vices and disordered passions within the soul that must be eradicated, not merely subdued.