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Were the Israelites to spare the trees of a land at war, or to cut them down?
Hard question · The law of Moses · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate
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In a long siege Israel is not to cut down the fruit trees round the city for siege works; trees that do not bear food may be felled.
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: 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.
Elisha tells the kings of Israel, Judah and Edom that the Lord will give Moab into their hand, and that they “shall fell every good tree”.
And he said, Thus saith the Lord, Make this valley full of ditches. For thus saith the Lord, Ye shall not see wind, neither shall ye see rain; yet that valley shall be filled with water, that ye may drink, both ye, and your cattle, and your beasts. And this is but a light thing in the sight of the Lord: he will deliver the Moabites also into your hand. And ye shall smite every fenced city, and every choice city, and shall fell every good tree, and stop all wells of water, and mar every good piece of land with stones.
The allies beat down Moab’s cities, stop its wells and fell “all the good trees”.
And they beat down the cities, and on every good piece of land cast every man his stone, and filled it; and they stopped all the wells of water, and felled all the good trees: only in Kir–haraseth left they the stones thereof; howbeit the slingers went about it, and smote it.
The objection
Deuteronomy forbids Israel to cut down the trees of a city it is besieging: “thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them”. Yet in 2 Kings the prophet Elisha, speaking for the Lord, tells the kings of Israel and Judah that they “shall fell every good tree” in Moab, and they do. Did God forbid the cutting down of fruit trees in war, or command it?
The answer
Deuteronomy 20:19-20 is a rule for one kind of case: a long siege of a city that Israel meant to take, “When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it”. The army was not to cut down the fruit trees round the city to build its siege works, “for thou mayest eat of them”. Trees that did not bear food could be felled for the purpose (20:20). The reason is practical and humane: the trees feed people, and they are not the enemy. The BSB renders the question in the verse, “Are the trees of the field human, that you should besiege them?” The rule protected the food of a land that people would go on living in once the siege was over.
2 Kings 3 describes a different kind of war. Mesha king of Moab had rebelled against Israel (3:4-5), and Israel, Judah and Edom marched against him, not to take Moab and settle it but to punish a rebel and break his power to make war. Elisha’s words are a prophecy of what the Lord would give them: “he will deliver the Moabites also into your hand” (3:18), and with it the wasting of Moab’s cities, trees, wells and fields (3:19). The account records that this is what happened (3:25). Keil and Delitzsch note that the prophecy alludes to Deuteronomy 20:19-20, and conclude that those instructions, given for the taking of Canaan, were not meant to apply to this campaign against Moab.
So the two passages do not give opposite rules for the same case. Deuteronomy sets the ordinary rule for Israel’s sieges of cities it would hold. 2 Kings records a particular judgment on Moab, announced by a prophet in the name of the same Lord who gave the law. The narrator does not present it as a breach of the law, and the lawgiver was free to direct one judgment differently from the general rule.
Other answers Christians give
The law covered sieges only
Gill suggests that Deuteronomy may concern only the trees of a city under siege, or only the cities of Canaan, or that God set the rule aside on this one occasion to make Moab’s punishment the heavier. On the first two readings the wasting of Moab’s countryside lay outside the law’s terms.
Not fruit trees
Adam Clarke thought that ‘every good tree’ meant trees an enemy could use, for fortifications and the like, not fruit trees, since those were protected by the law. Keil and Delitzsch take them to be fruit trees.
Still open
Interpreters differ on whether Elisha’s words in 3:19 are a command or a forecast of what the allies would do, since the Hebrew can be read either way, and on whether the kings were right to carry them out so thoroughly. The campaign also ended in a setback for Israel (3:27), in a verse whose meaning is itself debated.
From the classic commentators
In the announcement of the devastation of the land there is an allusion to Deuteronomy 20:19-20 … These instructions were not to apply to Moab, because the Moabites themselves as the arch-foes of Israel would not act in any other way with the land of Israel if they should gain the victory.C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: 2 Kings 3, at Bible Hub