When you shall besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them; for you may eat of them. You shall not cut them down, for is the tree of the field man, that it should be besieged by you?
Not to destroy fruit-bearing trees during a siege
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא־תַשְׁחִית אֶת־עֵצָהּ לִנְדֹּחַ עָלָיו גַּרְזֶן
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהירנו מהשחית האילנות כשנצור על עיר כדי להצר לאנשיה ולהכאיב לבם. הוא אמרו יתעלה לא תשחית את עצה, וכן כל הפסד נכנס תחת לאו זה כגון מי שישרוף בגד לריק או ישבור כלי גם כן עובר משום לא תשחית ולוקה, ואמר אזהרתה מהכא כי ממנו תאכל ואותו לא תכרות. וכבר נתבארו מפשטי מצוה זו בבבא קמא ובבא בתרא. (שופטים ושוטרים, שם):
That when we go to besiege a city, He prohibited us from destroying trees in order to distress its people and sadden their hearts. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "you must not destroy its trees" (Deuteronomy 20:19). And likewise does any waste come under this prohibition - such as one who burns up a garment for nothing or breaks a vessel. He also transgresses on account of, "you must not destroy," and is lashed. And [they] said (Makkot 22a), "And its prohibition is from here - 'for from it shall you eat, but it shall you not cut down.'" And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in [Chapter 2 of] Bava Batra. (See Parashat Shoftim; Mishneh Torah, Kings and Wars 6.)
Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.
Literary form: a flat, unconditional command
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Recorded as practiced today
Classical halakhic consequences
The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.
Imposed by a court
- Lashes (malkot)
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
No ritual remedy is recorded.
How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment
The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.
- Orthodox Binding
- Conservative Binding
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite As the catalog records it: binding (inferred from general Karaite peshat adherence to Torah law; no specific documented ruling on this commandment cited)
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
How later traditions received this commandment
How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.226-229 The catalog describes this reception as: paraphrase
- De Virtutibus 149-154 expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 4.299-301 The catalog describes this reception as: paraphrase
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- code of hammurabi CH regulates civil liability for damage to cultivated fields and orchards in peacetime, reflecting a broadly shared ANE valuation of agricultural land as productive economic capital; this is a civil-law analogue to the underlying valuation, not a parallel to the Deuteronomic wartime tree-protection rule, for which no direct ANE legal counterpart is attested Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §§42-48 (negligence in cultivation, flooding of a neighbor's field, and liability for resulting crop and orchard loss) Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks
One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.
This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.
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Article 5
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The enforcement mechanism of up to thirty-nine lashes for violation of the tree-protection rule during a siege constitutes corporal punishment; UDHR Article 5 prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment, under which flogging is universally classified.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
While the prohibition on destroying fruit-bearing trees is well aligned with modern environmental and humanitarian norms, the prescribed sanction of corporal flogging for its violation is disproportionate and incompatible with modern penal theory, which reserves such enforcement for no offense and instead uses fines, injunctions, or deprivation of liberty.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Rabbinic tradition holds that the authority to administer court-imposed lashes lapsed with the dissolution of the Sanhedrin after the destruction of the Second Temple; the corporal-punishment aspect of the commandment is de jure operative but de facto suspended in all recognized legal systems.