Scott Lively’s Church Declares Independence from Government Control
I’m ready to start building a congregation for First Century Bible Church and I do not recognize the authority of secular government to dictate any aspect of our doctrine or practice. As a Christian attorney and pastor I know and follow the law above the law, and claim the right of church sovereignty implicit in the original meaning of the separation of church and state, which is by no means a one way street controlled by the state.
Government does not recognize the tax-exemption of the church out of a sense of benevolent indulgence but because it has no power to tax a separate and equal sovereign.
In this sense, the church has greater autonomy relative to the federal and state governments than the state governments have relative to the federal government. The “supremacy clause” of Article 6 of the US Constitution subjects the states to federal law where the two conflict on a matter within federal jurisdiction.
In contrast, the First Amendment defines church sovereignty thusly: “Congress [the only legitimate legislative body] shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” That is an absolute prohibition on government interference with the church which pre-dates the Marbury v Madison power grab of the Supreme Court, under which subsequent judicial activism purported to regulate the church.
While other churches and congregations might have acquiesced to the court’s illegitimate authority, I am not bound by their decisions, having newly established my own church totally independent of them. I have not registered First Century Bible Church with the government and have no intention to do so.
As an Ambassador of the Church of Jesus Christ I do not recognize the authority of the Supreme Court — an arm of the state — to legislate from the bench on church/state matters. It retains authority to regulate the state in church/state matters, but not the church.
Clearly, the church has a Biblical duty to cooperate in church/state matters, and even more, to actively steward the secular society! But not as a inferior entity to the state. In the “coadjuvancy” of church and state envisioned by the founders, meaning the cooperation of separate sovereigns, the legal relationship of the two is the jurisprudential equivalent to an international treaty. More specifically, since it involves close interaction within the same geographic territory, the relationship is akin to that which exists between Native American tribes and the federal government, but the rights of the church are stronger than those of Indian tribes, because they come from God, not from established human customs about territorial possessions.
I have founded First Century Bible Church upon this premise, invoking the theological authority established by the Apostle Paul in his epistles and earthly ministry, and the political/legal authority recognized (not granted) by the First Amendment, which pre-existed the American colonies, as admitted by the Declaration of Independence. My claims are further bolstered by the first principle of the Magna Carta of 1215 (the foundation of modern human rights jurisprudence), to wit: “The English church shall be free.”
Today, following the prompting of the Holy Spirit, I am issuing an invitation to Bible-believing Christians everywhere to join First Century Bible Church by self-declaration of intention and agreement with what I consider the “essentials of the faith” as I currently understand and have articulated them here.
And I am today beginning the active work to establish both a local congregation for in-person fellowship, and a distant congregation around the world for Internet and or multi-media fellowship via the Internet and other means of connecting.
The LGBT Hijacking of Black Power
I’m better known today for my writings and teaching on anti-Marxist constitutionalism and on Biblical prophecy, but for thirty years my ministry was single-issue: opposing the LGBT political agenda around the world. One of the first things I observed from my front line culture war vantage-point was that the LGBT movement has a very parasitical nature – attaching itself like a leech to other constituencies of the progressive coalition to exploit whatever political advantage it can for itself, without regard for the damage this causes to the host body.
The first host was the Jews, as evidenced by the first symbol chosen by the “gays” to identify themselves: the inverted pink triangle. This was a blatant and outrageous attempt to exploit the public sympathy Jews hold by having suffered the Holocaust, symbolized by the yellow star.
The 5,000 to10,000 homosexuals estimated by “gay” historians to have been interned in the network of roughly 10,000 Nazi work camps (not the 6 death camps) — most for violating the same anti-sodomy laws in effect throughout the world in that era — wore pink triangles as part of the Nazi system for classifying inmates by criminal category. Based on that tenuous connection to Nazi-era Jews (who were almost universally opposed to sodomy as a gross violation of the Torah), the LGBTs attempted to fabricate a “Gay Holocaust” by which they could hijack Jewish political power for themselves under the banner of “The Pink Triangle.” That was the title of Richard Plant’s pioneering book on that theme (the first offering of an orchestrated political marketing campaign that swept American popular culture in the late 1980s and early 90s).
It was no mere coincidence that “The Pink Triangle” was published in the same year as the US Supreme Court ruling in Bowers v Hardwick (1986), which recognized the right of states to regulate harmful sexual conduct in the public interest, but specifically homosexual sodomy. Justice Byron White (a JFK appointee) literally mocked the “gay” argument that the (then admitted) lifestyle choice of sodomy should be constitutionally protected, writing for the majority: “to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best, facetious.”
The Bowers ruling (later overturned in Lawrence v Texas, 2003, by the chief engineer of “Gay Cultural Supremacy” in America, Justice Anthony Kennedy) marked the end of an LGBT political strategy launched in the 1940s. Now abandoning their admission that homosexuality was (and is) a lifestyle choice, they pivoted to the so-called “born that way” argument originally popularized by German homosexual occultist Karl Ulrichs in the mid-1800s, who claimed that male homosexuals were really female souls trapped in male bodies, thus “born that way” with supposedly no control over their sexual proclivities or conduct.
After Bowers, the entire American LGBT movement began marching in a new direction, insisting homosexuality is innate and unchangeable (and thus recovery from same-sex attraction disorder is impossible), and demanding recognition as a helpless victim class whose homosexuality was the equivalent of being Jewish: ergo the pink triangle.
But in 1995, Orthodox Jewish Holocaust researcher, Kevin E. Abrams and I, wrote The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, which successfully debunked the “Gay Holocaust” hoax and (due to an outcry from Orthodox Rabbis in response to the book), the “gays” were forced to abandon the pink triangle (with a few rare exceptions).
Having lost its first host, the LGBT political parasite attached itself to the Black Civil Rights movement, which it has possessed and exploited ever since. Dropping the pink triangle like a snake sheds its skin, it hijacked the rainbow as its new symbol, which it stole from Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.
From that point forward it drove the American civil rights agenda for its own purposes, always bundling LGBT political goals within a “coalition” agenda, and using primarily Black front-persons to lead the efforts while using their own extraordinary power to manipulate the political process and the media from the shadows. This was best exemplified in the “Human Rights Commission” strategy in which the Dems established city and state HRCs to “promote diversity” and “oppose hate crimes” through implementation and strategic enforcement of “anti-discrimination” laws. These laws were always sold as a defensive “shield” for “minorities” but in practice used as a pro-active “sword” to set up and punish LGBT opponents (think “bake shops” and “printing companies”).
The LGBT movement insisted that all anti-discrimination policies must include “sexual orientation” (an invention of “Queer Theorists” to cloak the “born that way” lie in pseudo-scientific jargon). By this method, augmented by a great many “hate hoaxes,” laws characterizing opposition to homosexuality as “homophobia” (an LGBT-invented slur) spread from just a few cities to become nationwide public policy, entrenched in state and federal law, protected by multiple layers of (judicially activist) Supreme Court precedent.
The LGBT’s still control the Black host body as evidenced by the Black Lesbian couple running Black Lives Matter who aggressively push the LGBT agenda under the BLM banner. Again, it was not accidental that the first faction to steal the media spotlight once BLM took to the national stage was the “Black Trans Lives Matter” sub-cult.
The LGBT hijacking of Black power is all the more egregious a moral crime in that the Black community as a whole (though not the leaders, who have mostly been bought off) has and still does strongly oppose the LGBT agenda – a fact the Marxist media hides from the public.
Somehow the rest of the leftist coalition never recognizes the LGBT threat until it’s too late, the most recent example being the hijacking of the Feminist contingent by “transgendered women,” which has all but destroyed womens’ sports. And even when they discover they’re being exploited, they never seem to reconsider the presuppositions of liberalism that led them into the trap.
In the case of the Black community, however, there is a ready solution at hand, and that is the aggressive reclamation of the leadership of their movement by the Bible-believing Black pastors. I urge you to forward this essay to them.
America and the Clock of Judgment | BNBS | Episode 18
The Clock of Judgment
This week I am releasing the 4th installment of my book “Dynasty of Darkness: Satan’s long serpentine trail through human history in the role of successive Antichrists, and the imminent rise of his last days kingdom” in text and video formats. In this installment I analyze the books of Joshua and Judges to profile the Antichrists of the 400 year period of the pre-monarchic Israelite republic, when the Hebrews fought the Canaanites for control of the Holy Land. That season of Biblical history has special prophetic significance for Americans because it parallels the 400 years of our republic from its founding in 1620.
Was pre-monarchic Israel a republic? Yes. The term “republic” is the Latin translation of a 6th century BC Greek term “res publica,” coined to distinguish governments “owned by the public” from those “owned by the rulers.” Historically it included any alternative to monarchy, as was true during the 1600s in Western Europe and Great Britain when the concept of a “constitutional republic” began to mature toward its present form. The Hebrew nation established through Abraham by God has, of course, always been a “theocracy” (a term coined by Josephus in the 1st Century AD), but the terms “republic” and “theocracy” are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the transition of the nation of Israel, from “republic” to “monarchy” during the time of the Prophet Samuel did not change its essential “theocratic” nature since God ultimately ruled both as the same lawgiver above the same law that both types of government were equally subject to.
Is America a modern iteration of the Israelite republic? I believe it is. America’s first written constitution was the Mayflower Compact, a covenantal oath of Pilgrim Separatists who crossed the Atlantic Ocean with the specific intention to create a nation “for the advancement of the Christian faith” – just as the Hebrews crossed the Jordan River to establish a nation upon the Torah, and whose first act in the land under Moses’ successor Joshua was to corporately reaffirm God’s Abrahamic covenant as codified in the Mosaic law. Both republics acknowledged God as the Supreme Authority, and their leaders managed the day by day national affairs according to the rule of law He had established through human agents.
After the US Constitution had been drafted “in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven” (a quote from the signature clause), resistance at the state level raised doubt it would ever be adopted, until Rev. Samuel Langdon’s sermon “The Republic of the Israelites as an Example to the American States” inspired New Hampshire to cast the final ratifying vote.
Does America’s history parallel that of the Israelite republic? Yes. Like Israel, America started morally strong and grew weaker over time, being intermittently “revived” to spiritual health. God raised up Judges to rescue the Israelites from their sin after its painful consequences caused them to repent and beseech Him for deliverance. America’s pattern was similar and God raised up men like Jonathan Edwards (First Great Awakening, 1730s – 1770s), Charles Finney (Second Great Awakening 1790s – 1830s), and others.
It is human nature to forget God’s law during times of peace and plenty until sin-produced suffering reminds us to repent. It is Satan’s nature to exploit and institutionalize our sin to increasingly weaken us from cycle to cycle. I call this the “Clock of Judgment” because it cycles like the hands of a mechanical clock from Morally Healthy at Noon, to Backsliding by Three, to Judgement by Six, to Repentance by Nine, to Restoration through Revival at Twelve, over and over again.
Eventually, due to the institutionalization of sin, the “revivals” become so compromised they can’t overcome entrenched societal corruption (e.g church-based LGBT tolerance).
In the Israelite republic, the turning point was under the 6th Judge Gideon, whom we tend to lionize in modern sermons but whose father built the town altar to Baal, and who himself took a Caananite concubine whose son Abilelech became the first-ever Hebrew Antichrist. Gideon’s “revival” had virtually no residual power at the time of his death, and soon afterward Abilelech slaughtered all 70 of his male siblings (except Jotham who escaped) to make himself King of (Canaanite) Shechem. God then killed Abimelech by His own hand using a nameless woman (Judges 9:56), NOT by raising a deliverer. After that the republic disintegrated slowly into anarchy until “every man did what was right in his own eyes.” There were other Judges raised to preserve Israel as a nation in the Holy Land, but never again did the republic as a whole return to full spiritual health.
In America, the turning point was under “Antichrist” (or Antichrist-ally) Judge Hugo Black. As the “swing vote” on the Supreme Court he wrote two majority opinions (Everson v Board of Education, 1947; and Torcaso v Watkins, 1961), converting Jefferson’s “Separation of Church and State” metaphor into binding constitutional law. In these, this former KKK clansman who helped LBJ cheat his way into the US Senate, and whose own appointment to the court was illegal ), pushed America off the bedrock of the Bible onto the shifting sand of Secular Humanism with the Everson ruling. This fulfilled a key Antichrist objective in 2 Thessalonians 2, setting the court “above God and everything worshiped as god” as arbiter of all religious claims relating to public policy, under the deceptive rubric of “benevolent neutrality.” And in Torcaso he made Atheism a “religion” equal to Christianity, legally empowering militant God-haters including Madalyn Marie O’Hare to weaponize the 14th Amendment “equal protection” clause to purge Christianity from public life, starting with public school prayer in 1963.
November 18th will be the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’s landing at Plymouth, two weeks past the 2020 election. Is America doomed to soon surrender its republic to a wicked King Saul as Israel did? Or will we truly repent and be healed as a nation? The Clock of Judgment is ticking.
Antichrists in the Holy Land
Click below to download the PDF of this installment.
Scott Lively Says DON’T Open the Schools
SCOTUS and the Coming Mandatory Vaccines | BNBS | 17
Scott Lively on Portland’s Antifa Fascism
There are seasons in human affairs when mankind can see much more than just the tip of the iceberg of Satanic control in this world. Evil prefers to spread in darkness, but when God’s people stand firmly against the Satanic agenda despite increasing punishment, they compel the adversary to send ever greater numbers of his forces out of the shadows onto the battlefield. In those rare moments, the full extent to which the leaders and systems of this world are corrupted gets exposed to those with spiritual discernment.
It is a dark and chilling sight when the demonic realm attacks in waves of escalating fury and power – like a comic-book villain transforming into a massive and malevolent behemoth, part real and part illusion — seemingly beyond the power of the righteous to defeat.
That is exactly what is happening today in the Marxist revolution against Trump: a continually escalating spiritual war of aggression is being waged on the political and cultural battlefields of the physical world – all because Donald Trump and his Bible-believing Christian base firmly resist the Marxist global agenda.
There have been previous examples, including the elites’ campaign to destroy Robert Bork to prevent his confirmation to the Supreme Court, but the closest parallel to today’s anti-Trump coup occurred when the Christian para-church network Oregon Citizens Alliance took on the LGBT agenda at the height of the Reagan Revolution. OCA’s ultimate defeat (through establishment GOP treachery and that of GOP-allied churches) is the reason why Oregon’s defacto capital Portland is now the epicenter of Marxist revolution in America. I know, because I was on the front lines of that battle, which launched my thirty year career as a Christian social activist and missionary to the global pro-family movement.
Ironically, I was an unwitting Marxism-influenced teenager when I migrated from Massachusetts to Portland in 1977 because of its liberal drug laws. I spent almost ten years of my sixteen year bondage to drug and alcohol addiction in that city, hanging out with the radical leftists, including the very types of people rioting today, on the very same streets.
But in 1986 I was delivered and healed on my knees in prayer at a secular rehab clinic. Months later my former drug dealer, who had independently converted to Christ, took me to a Bible-believing church for the first time where a truly godly pastor opened my eyes and heart to Truth. I switched sides in the culture war and, after some inner spiritual preparation (but no practical training or worldly credentials), the Lord miraculously made me the OCA’s State Communications Director.
Through many local and statewide ballot measure campaigns, I was in the hottest fire-fights on the leading edge of culture war. The Nazi swastikas repeatedly painted on the Portland megachurch I attended (solely because I worshiped there) were just a minor irritant compared to the campaign of severe punishment all of us at OCA endured: hate mail, bomb threats, death threats too numerous to count, vandalism, public harassment, continuous malicious character assassination (by ALL of Oregon’s corporate media), four separate major lawsuits over a five-year period seeking over $11 million (against OCA and me personally), numerous serious false flag hate crimes blamed on us, including a series of 21 cross-burnings on the front lawn of a Black, supposedly wheelchair-bound lesbian who was finally caught by two rogue cops in defiance of the Portland Police Chief – a prominent OCA critic who later became Mayor.
When I say our OCA experience prefigured today’s anti-Trump campaign, I’m not exaggerating. I personally saw black-clad Oregon Antifa terrorists marching with “Kill the Police” signs more than twenty years ago. I experienced the betrayal of the Romneyesque Republican Party Chairman Craig Berkman doing an anti-OCA joint television commercial with his Democrat counterpart, and then the Republican-controlled legislature “preempting the field” on sexual orientation policy to instantly invalidate 26 hard-fought city and county ballot measures we passed with margins up to 80% – all while Portland-area GOP-allied “conservative” churches and a turf-conscious rival “Christian” PAC attacked OCA as “divisive.” I experienced the 11th hour betrayal of the Portland Catholic Archbishop William Leveda who succumbed to pressure and urged a No vote on our “No Special Rights Act” before transferring to San Francisco. (I believe it was “Christian” compromise to appease the evil-doers that ultimately defeated us.)
While OCA’s battlefield was the LGBT agenda, and it is no accident that the co-founders of Black Lives Matter are Marxist lesbians, today’s battle transcends that issue. However, what OCA accomplished in our season of firestorms was to expose the whole Satanic army to public scrutiny: from the rotten RINOs, to the corporate giants, to the non-profit foundations to the fake church leaders, to the media, to the universities. We were so persistent and unyielding in our stand for truth that the demonic realm had to completely emerge from the shadows to fight us. We exposed the whole Satanic iceberg in Oregon – just as Trump is now doing nationally.
Sadly, there wasn’t a constitutionalist hero in Oregon to melt that cancerous lump then, and thus the demonic hard left, greatly emboldened by victory despite being exposed, gained a “mandate to escalate,” explaining why Portland is now the national poster-child for Antifa anarchy. But America today has the earthy and bare-knuckle fighting but constitution-loving Donald Trump. He’s not a perfect man, but neither were any of the “Judges” raised by God in times of crisis to lead the Israelite Republic. If, despite everything being thrown at us, we can get Trump reelected, America’s story might possibly have a happy ending. We’ll at least have a fighting chance.
The secret to victory in battles with Satanic principalities and powers is simple but not easy: “Take up the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you will be able to stand your ground, and having done everything, to stand” (Ephesians 6:10-18). Brethren, don’t let the Adversary dishearten or stampede you or Portland will be America’s future: STAND!!
BNBS | Episode 16
Scott Lively on Waging War Against Marxism
The Seven Principles of Biblical Warfare For Purging the Cancer of Marxism from America: A Teaching on Deuteronomy 20.
As a culture war missionary and attorney, I believe the Bible contains the highest law on this earth and the divine principles underlying the Mosaic law remain constant and binding upon all mankind, even in cases where the “letter” of individual statutes may rightly be deemed situational to an ancient context or fulfilled by Christ. In my view, it is the spirit, not the letter, of the law that is perfect per Psalm 19:7 and 2 Corinthians 3:6, and as essential in the fabric of Creation as the fundamentals of physics.
That is an important caveat in an article offering Deuteronomy 20 as the model for defeating the attempted Marxist coup we’re suffering. These Marxists are skilled and experienced liars – professional false witnesses – who routinely misrepresent the words and deeds of American constitutionalists for political ends, and they hold a virtual monopoly on our public information systems. It has never been more important for patriots to be circumspect in our rhetoric, not primarily because of THEM, because Marxists will simply fabricate lies to attribute to us no matter what we say.
No, we must be especially scrupulous in what we say and do now because IF, by the reestablishment of the rule of the true law, we are able to purge the cancer of Marxism from our Judeo-Christian civilization, we will retroactively be held to those same higher standards for our speech and actions in the prosecution of that war. So, yes, I am saying Marxism is a cancer that must be removed because it is now clear that our prior policy of peaceful coexistence on equal terms is no longer possible. But I am also saying we must not employ corrupt Marxist strategies, tactics and reasoning in the removal process.
We must not be like the Socialist Weimar government of the 1920s and empower an army of National Socialist street thugs to fight the Soviet Communist street thugs in the blood-splattered cities of Bavaria. Neither can we create a South American-style dictatorial right-wing crack-down of skull-busting storm troopers repeatedly chasing left-wing guerillas back into the hills.
What we need is an organized nationwide army of God-Fearing Constitution-Loving Patriots who follow God’s law of warfare.
John Adams warned that “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion….Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.” Today’s Marxist revolutionaries have proved Adams correct by shattering the bulwarks of the constitution from within – using liberty as a springboard to anarchy and tolerance as a pathway to tyranny. Their malignancy has overwhelmed the immune system of the body politic, leaving the extreme measure of emergency surgery as our final option.
In other words, what we need is an American Reset to constitutional originalism in which all the seats of power and influence in this nation are filled by constitutionalists. These constitutionalists will not kill those whom they supplant, as the Marxists will certainly kill some (perhaps many) patriots if their coup succeeds (mark my words). Constitutionalists will simply take the Marxists’ power away and update America’s sedition and treason laws to prevent their resurgence.
So HOW can this be done? By using the seven principles of war from Deuteronomy 20:
- Men skilled in warfare must lead the army, but the clergy among the leadership must provide spiritual encouragement and remind everyone that the enemy’s numbers and strength mean nothing because God will fight for them if they trust and serve Him (verses 1-4).
- Only brave warriors who can focus on the task at hand without worldly distractions can serve in this army. Everyone else should stay out of the way (verses 5-8).
- Only after the army is formed do the officers appoint campaign commanders suited to the particular battles (verse 9).
- Every stronghold must be given the chance to surrender, and if they do the people will not be punished beyond being completely stripped of power and required from that point forward to scrupulously submit to the rule of law under direct supervision (verses 10-11).
- Strongholds which refuse to surrender must be besieged and defeated, and their leaders punished appropriately. This is where the principle of the law supercedes the letter in the modern context, since this army must not – with the exception of actual and aggravated Treason as determined by a court of law – employ capital punishment. Further, all of the resources of that stronghold must be re-purposed to serve the rule of law. (verses 12-15).
- Rebellious strongholds which fall in the special category of institutions or industries intended to teach, promote and uphold objective truth for the benefit of all of society (e.g. academia, law, media) must receive greater attention by the conquering army regarding all combatants, not just the leaders, and their punishment must include restrictions that strip them of every means to advance their ideology and agenda from that point forward (verses 16-18).
- In the prosecution of this war, any tangible resources that can be restored to beneficial use must be preserved (and used in subsequent battles), but those which cannot bear fruit for the restored society should be destroyed (verses 19-20).
By God’s grace we have a Commander in Chief who seems to truly want the restoration of America, and who has clergy in his inner circle who could introduce him to these seven Biblical principles of war. I pray they will see this article and pass its insights along.
But in my view, the army which must be formed is not exclusively an arm of the Trump administration, but a coalition of forces like the Continental Militia of the Founders’ era. And prominent in those ranks should be the modern clergy of the Black Robed Regiment and patriotic men and women from every walk of life. If you agree, sign my Declaration of Restoration to add your voice to this rallying cry. And please pass this message on to others.
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Deuteronomy 20: The Laws of Warfare
1“When you go out to battle against your enemies and see horses and chariots and people more numerous than you, do not be afraid of them; for the LORD your God, who brought you up from the land of Egypt, is with you. 2“When you are approaching the battle, the priest shall come near and speak to the people. 3“He shall say to them, ‘Hear, O Israel, you are approaching the battle against your enemies today. Do not be fainthearted. Do not be afraid, or panic, or tremble before them, 4for the LORD your God is the one who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.’ 5“The officers also shall speak to the people, saying, ‘Who is the man that has built a new house and has not dedicated it? Let him depart and return to his house, otherwise he might die in the battle and another man would dedicate it. 6‘Who is the man that has planted a vineyard and has not begun to use its fruit? Let him depart and return to his house, otherwise he might die in the battle and another man would begin to use its fruit. 7‘And who is the man that is engaged to a woman and has not married her? Let him depart and return to his house, otherwise he might die in the battle and another man would marry her.’ 8“Then the officers shall speak further to the people and say, ‘Who is the man that is afraid and fainthearted? Let him depart and return to his house, so that he might not make his brothers’ hearts melt like his heart.’ 9“When the officers have finished speaking to the people, they shall appoint commanders of armies at the head of the people.
10“When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace. 11“If it agrees to make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your forced labor and shall serve you. 12“However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. 13“When the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword. 14“Only the women and the children and the animals and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourself; and you shall use the spoil of your enemies which the LORD your God has given you. 15“Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not of the cities of these nations nearby. 16“Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. 17“But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you, 18so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the LORD your God.
19“When you besiege a city 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, and you shall not cut them down. For is the tree of the field a man, that it should be besieged by you? 20“Only the trees which you know are not fruit trees you shall destroy and cut down, that you may construct siegeworks against the city that is making war with you until it falls.
NASB Version
