Law for Possessing the Land

⁵⁰ Then the Lord spoke to Moses in the plains of Moab by the Jordan opposite Jericho, saying, ⁵¹ “Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘^(A)When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, ⁵² you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from you, and ^(B)destroy all their idolatrous sculptures, destroy all their cast metal images, and eliminate all their high places;

² and when the Lord your God turns them over to you and you ^[a]defeat them, ^(A)you shall ^[b]utterly destroy them. ^(B)You shall not make a covenant with them ^(C)nor be gracious to them.

^16 (A)Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave anything that breathes alive. ¹⁷ Instead, you shall ^[a]utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, just as the Lord your God has commanded you, ¹⁸ so that they will not teach you to do ^[b](B)all the same detestable practices of theirs which they have done for their gods, ^[c]by which you would ^(C)sin against the Lord your God.

¹⁹ “When you besiege a city for a long time, to make war against it in order to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by swinging an axe against them; for you may eat from them, so you shall not cut them down. For ^[d]is the tree of the field a human, that it should ^[e]be besieged by you? ²⁰ Only the trees that you know ^[f]are not fruit trees you shall destroy and cut down, so that you may construct siegeworks against the city that is making war against you until it falls.