The murder commenced in the family circle is to be continued in the national policy. If a city of the Hebrews reject Jahveh, “thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword” (v. 15); nothing is to escape, a burning bloodstained ruin is to be left “for the Lord thy God” (v. 16), and then Jahveh will bless his brutal servants, who have done “that which is right in the eyes of the Lord thy God” (v. 18). This command is of divine authority, and has been largely obeyed in Christendom, but people have fortunately become too civilised to carry it out now. In Deut. xiv., some of the natural history blunders of Lev. xi. are repeated. It is confusing, however, after reading in Lev. xi., 21—23, “these may ye eat, of every flying creeping thing,” etc., to find in Deut. xiv., 19, “Every creeping thing that flieth is unclean unto you; they shall not be eaten.” So that the Israelites are deprived of those remarkable four-legged locusts, beetles and grasshoppers which “have legs above their feet.” (Do other animals carry their feet above their legs?) It is delightful to find Moses speaking of a bat as a bird; clearly in those days the schoolmaster was not abroad, but it is hard that we should be compelled to choose between the blasphemy of speaking of the bat as a mammal, and the falsehood of treating it as a bird. A beautiful touch of generosity is to be found in v. 21: “Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself; thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is in thy gates, that he may eat it; or thou mayest sell it unto an alien.” The general law of warfare laid down in Deut. xx., 10—15, is brutal in the extreme. If any foreign city ventures to defend itself against Hebrew aggression, and closes its gates against the invader, then it is to be besieged, and “when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt Smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword.” A yet worse fate is to be dealt out to the cities of Palestine, for in these “thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” (v. 16). Of course such method of war has nothing surprising, when we consider the cruelty and barbarism of the Eastern nations of which the Hebrews were one, but it is surprising that in the nineteenth century the bloody customs of a savage tribe should be set forth as founded on “divine authority.”