15. Thus you will do to all the cities that are very distant from you, which are not among the towns of these nations nearby.
16. However, only from the cities of these peoples, which Adonai your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes live.
17. You must utterly destroy them—the Hittites , the Amorites , the Canaanites , the Perizzites , the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as Adonai your God has commanded you.
18. You are to do this so they will not teach you to do all the abominations as they have done for their gods, and so you would sin against Adonai your God.
19. “When you lay siege to a city for a long time, making war against it to capture it, you are not to destroy its trees by swinging an axe at them. For from them you may eat, so you shall not chop them down. For is the tree of the field human, that it should enter the siege before you?
20. You may destroy and chop down only the trees that you know are not trees for food, so that you may build siege equipment against the city that is making war with you until its downfall.