申命记 20:20

Chinese NCV (Simplified)

只有你知道不結果子的樹木，你才可以毀壞砍伐，用來建造圍城的設備，攻擊那與你作戰的城，直到把它攻下為止。”

Parallel Translations

Chinese Union (Simplified)
惟 独 你 所 知 道 不 是 结 果 毁 坏 、 砍 伐 ， 用 以 修 筑 营 垒 ， 攻 击 那 与 你 打 仗 的 城 ， 直 到 攻 塌 了 。

Contextual Overview

¹⁰ When you march up to attack a city, first make them an offer of peace. ¹¹ If they accept your offer and open their gates to you, all the people of that city will become your slaves and work for you. ¹² But if they do not make peace with you and fight you in battle, you should surround that city. ¹³ The Lord your God will give it to you. Then kill all the men with your swords, ¹⁴ and you may take everything else in the city for yourselves. Take the women, children, and animals, and you may use these things the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. ¹⁵ Do this to all the cities that are far away, that do not belong to the nations nearby. ¹⁶ But leave nothing alive in the cities of the land the Lord your God is giving you. ¹⁷ Completely destroy these people: the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded. ¹⁸ Otherwise, they will teach you what they do for their gods, and if you do these hateful things, you will sin against the Lord your God. ¹⁹ If you surround and attack a city for a long time, trying to capture it, do not destroy its trees with an ax. You can eat the fruit from the trees, but do not cut them down. These trees are not the enemy, so don't make war against them.

Bible Verse Review
  from Treasury of Scripure Knowledge

thou shalt build: Deuteronomy 1:28, 2 Chronicles 26:15, Ecclesiastes 9:14, Isaiah 37:33, Jeremiah 6:6, Jeremiah 33:4, Ezekiel 17:17

be subdued: Heb. come down

Reciprocal: 2 Kings 3:19 - fell 2 Kings 3:25 - and felled

Gill's Notes on the Bible

Only the trees which thou knowest that they be not trees for meat,.... Which might be known not only by their not having fruit upon them, but by other tokens, and even at a time of year when there was no fruit on any, which might be sometimes the season of a siege:

thou shalt destroy and cut them down; if so to do was of any disservice to the enemy, or of any service to them, as follows; they had a liberty to destroy them if they would:

and thou shall build bulwarks against the city that maketh war, until it be subdued; build bulwarks of the trees cut down, and raise batteries with them, or make machines and engines of the wood of them, to cast stones into the city to annoy the inhabitants of it, in order to make them surrender, and until they do it. All this may be an emblem of the axe being to be laid to fruitless trees in a moral and spiritual sense; and of trees of righteousness, laden with the fruits of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, being preserved and never to be cut down or rooted up; see Matthew 3:10.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Directions intended to prevent wanton destruction of life and property in sieges.

Deuteronomy 20:16

Forbearance, however, was not to be shown toward the Canaanite nations, which were to be utterly exterminated (compare Deuteronomy 7:1-4). The command did not apply to beasts as well as men (compare Joshua 11:11, Joshua 11:14).

Deuteronomy 20:19

The parenthesis may he more literally rendered “for man is a tree of the field,” i. e., has his life from the tree of the field, is supported in life by it (compare Deuteronomy 24:6). The Egyptians seem invariably to have cut down the fruit-trees in war.