Chapter 20
Warfare. Israel to remember always, that even when outnumbered, it is God who fights for them.
10 "When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. 11 And if it responds to you peaceably and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. 12 But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. 13 And when the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword, 14 but the women and the little ones, the livestock, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as plunder for yourselves. And you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you. 15 Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. 16 But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, 17 but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded, 18 that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the LORD your God. [Deu 20:10-18 ESV]
So if the cities were far away, and surrendered, lives could be spared. This was more lenient than most national practices at this time. So Israel is told to be merciful if they go to war with cities and nations far away. If and only if they will surrender.
However, inside Canaan itself, God wanted everything killed. Men, women, children, animals. Everything that breathed. This was the punishment for the abominations that these nations had and were committing, including sacrificing their own children to their gods. Their punishment was death. Those who actually killed their children and who actually practiced divination and such, were to be killed, and all those who stuck around and participated, or ignored or passively accepted such things, were also condemned to die. Standing by while atrocity is committed over and over earns you a death penalty of your own. How many of us would be condemned by these rules today? What goes on while we stand by and do nothing? Further, God did not want his people to begin practicing the same things that those in Canaan practiced. Everything about the Canaanites religion was to die with the people who lived there and practiced those religions.
I cringe when I hear Muslims denigrated because they kill anyone who won't convert to Islam. When we use that as the reason to hate them. This is wrong, because it is indisputable that God ordered Israel to kill everyone, there was no opportunity to convert. They were to be killed.
Our problem with Muslims should be that they worship a false God, they deny Christ, and they follow a false religion, a false god. We need to witness to them, not denigrate them.
(Hmm...this second time through, I don't believe I have things quite right in the paragraph above. There is more to it than saying that Muslims are only doing the same things God ordered Israel to do. They don't claim to be living under Mosaic Law, nor do they use the Bible as their justification for what they do. They have their own book, written in 600 AD and claim authority for what they do comes from that.
Muslims are living under their own perverted version of a covenant that has fallen under its own terms anyway. Abraham, whom they profess to model their practices after, certainly never advocated killing everyone who opposed his religion. He, and Isaac, and Jacob, very often moved away to prevent conflict with those who worshiped otherwise. None of these three patriarchs was warlike, ever. Muslim dietary laws, and ritual prayers, and so on - are just an imitation of the Mosaic Law that is no longer in effect anyway. And wasn't in effect at the time of Muhammad. The more you read the Bible, the more you see Islam as a mistake. Perhaps a well-intentioned one originally, but an increasingly inexcusable one.)
The next verses, through 9, seem to speak against conscription. Service was required, unless there were mitigating circumstances. Certain situations warranted a - hmm, what was it called in the Viet Nam war? Not a waiver. But there were exceptions for young white men enrolled in college. But very few for black men who were not in college. Obviously, this rule can be corrupted also.
The last few verses, 19, 20, say that slash and burn warfare was not to be practiced. They could cut down trees, but not fruit trees. They were not allowed to totally devastate the lands they were trying to conquer. Fruit trees they could eat from, but they were not to cut them down.