DEUT992 The most conspicuous presentation of a Jewish biblical conception of a religious duty to restrain warfare is a cluster of commandments in Deuteronomy 20, the fifth book of the Pentateuch, the Torah, which Jews regard as the fundamental and most sacred part of the Bible. The activities to be governed by these commandments are: waging a war, exempting some combatants from participating in it, offering the enemy peaceful surrender, treating captives and booty, and conducting a siege. Additional Deuteronomy 21 verses govern the case of a combatant desiring to have a captive beautiful woman as a wife. The ethics of warfare embodied in these norms rests on a fundamental religious strategy that permeates the whole body of Jewish commandments: Jews may be involved in every human sphere of activity, whether individual or collective, except for idol worship, but their activity within each sphere is significantly restrained. Thus, for example, setting a siege around a town is permitted, being an ordinary, non-idolatrous act of warfare, but the siege ought not to involve cutting down fruit trees. Any moral evaluation of this ethics of warfare should consist of two parts: a moral evaluation of the imposed constraint, and a moral evaluation of what is permitted. The first evaluation involves the following consideration: If (a) the cause of war is good and (b) a constraint imposed on warfare activities does not eliminate the ability to gain victory, then (c) the imposed constraint presumably helps alleviate the calamities of war and therefore (d) is morally worthy. It seems that the Deuteronomy 20 "you shall not" constraints are all morally commendable. The second evaluation focuses on the constrained dimension of the sphere of activity in order to determine whether it permits activities that are morally unjustifiable. The results of this evaluation of the norms of Deuteronomy 20 are mixed. On the one hand, the exemption of certain men, such as one who has betrothed a wife and has not taken her," delineates the corps of combatants in a just and effective way. On the other hand, the association of proclaiming peace with the requirement "that all people that are found therein shall serve you at forced labor" [this verse] is indeed morally unjustifiable. Other commandments are even worse, for example, the norm that when a town will make no peace, "you shall put all its males to the sword" (v. 13). (Continued at [[DEUT996]] Deuteronomy 20:13 sword OXFORD 488-9). (By Aaron S. Gross, "Jewish Animal Ethics")