Deuteronomy 20 · a question people ask
Was the offer of peace in 20:10 for every city, or only for the cities far off?
The chapter gives two laws side by side. For a city Israel draws near to fight: "proclaim peace to it" (20:10); if it answers with peace, its people become "forced laborers" (20:11); if it "will make no peace with you, but will make war against you, then you shall besiege it" (20:12). Then: "Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far off from you, which are not of the cities of these nations" (20:15). For "the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance" (20:16), the command is "you shall utterly destroy them" (20:17), with the reason "that they not teach you to follow all their abominations, which they have done for their gods" (20:18). The chapter doesn't say in so many words whether the call to peace in 20:10 was also for the cities of the land, and readers take it in two ways. Both agree that a far city was to hear peace first (20:10, 20:15), and that 20:18 gives the reason for the command about the cities of the land. Why these peoples were to be utterly destroyed at all is the honest question in Numbers 21, taken up again in Deuteronomy 7; its two readings rest on 9:5 and on 20:17-18.
How Christians read it
Where Christians differ, Favor sets out the main views side by side and doesn't pick one.
Peace was for the far cities
Some read 20:10-14 as the law for far cities only. It ends, "Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far off from you, which are not of the cities of these nations" (20:15), and the next verse turns: "But of the cities of these peoples" (20:16). Of the peoples of the land Moses had said, "You shall make no covenant with them" (7:2). When the Hivites of Gibeon came saying, "We have come from a far country" (Joshua 9:6), the men of Israel answered, "What if you live among us? How could we make a covenant with you?" (Joshua 9:7).
Deuteronomy 20:15-16 · Deuteronomy 7:2 · Joshua 9:6-7
Peace was offered to every city first
Others read 20:10 as the first step toward any city, with 20:15-18 setting out what follows when a city will not make peace. Joshua says, "There was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel, except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon" (Joshua 11:19), where "made peace" is the same Hebrew verb as "make no peace" in 20:12, and the next verse says, "For it was of the LORD to harden their hearts, to come against Israel in battle" (Joshua 11:20). And Moses sent "words of peace" (2:26) to Sihon, one of "the two kings of the Amorites" (Joshua 2:10).
Deuteronomy 20:10-12 · Joshua 11:19-20 · Deuteronomy 2:26 · Joshua 2:10
The verses
“Not for your righteousness or for the uprightness of your heart do you go in to possess their land; but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD your God does drive them out from before you, and that he may establish the word which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”