Laws Concerning War with Canaanite Nations

16 As for the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is going to give you as an inheritance, you must not allow a single living thing to survive. 17 Instead you must utterly annihilate them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites – just as the Lord your God has commanded you, 18 so that they cannot teach you all the abhorrent ways they worship their gods, causing you to sin against the Lord your God. 19 If you besiege a city for a long time while attempting to capture it, you must not chop down its trees, for you may eat fruit from them and should not cut them down. A tree in the field is not human that you should besiege it! 20 However, you may chop down any tree you know is not suitable for food, and you may use it to build siege works against the city that is making war with you until that city falls.

21 If a homicide victim should be found lying in a field in the land the Lord your God is giving you, and no one knows who killed him, 2 your elders and judges must go out and measure how far it is to the cities in the vicinity of the corpse. 3 Then the elders of the city nearest to the corpse must take from the herd a heifer that has not been worked – that has never pulled with the yoke – 4 and bring the heifer down to a wadi with flowing water, to a valley that is neither plowed nor sown. There at the wadi they are to break the heifer’s neck. 5 Then the Levitical priests will approach (for the Lord your God has chosen them to serve him and to pronounce blessings in his name, and to decide every judicial verdict ) 6 and all the elders of that city nearest the corpse must wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley. 7 Then they must proclaim, “Our hands have not spilled this blood, nor have we witnessed the crime. 8 Do not blame your people Israel whom you redeemed, O Lord, and do not hold them accountable for the bloodshed of an innocent person.” Then atonement will be made for the bloodshed. 9 In this manner you will purge out the guilt of innocent blood from among you, for you must do what is right before the Lord.