Deuteronomy 2:32

"Then Sihon came out against us, he and all his people, unto battle at Jahaz. And Jehovah our God delivered him up before us; and we smote him and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed every inhabited city, with the women and the little ones; and we left none remaining: only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves, with the spoil of the cities which we had taken. From the Aroer, which is on the edge of the valley of Arnon, and from the city that is in the valley, even unto Gilead, there was not a city too high for us; Jehovah our God delivered up all before us; only to the land of the children of Ammon thou camest not near; all the side of the river of Jabbok, and the cities of the hill-country, and wheresoever Jehovah our God forbade us."

Nearly all Christians focus immediately upon the horrible aspect of this passage in that the Holy Scriptures approvingly speak of the utter destruction of whole populations "with the women and the little ones," and a great many suppose that they have progressed far beyond what they consider to be such basic immorality as that which appears here. This is a mistaken view. When any culture has so polluted its spiritual environment as to make it impossible to rear children to believe in God and obey His Word, God always destroys that culture, and it will happen finally one more time in the holocaust preceding the Second Advent of Christ. (See Revelation 16 and the interpretation of it in this series of commentaries.) By their excessive wickedness the race of Sihon had forfeited their right of existence, and it would have been no act of mercy whatever for people to have been spared to live in that environment.

"Utterly destroyed" (Deuteronomy 2:34) has the meaning of "put under the ban."[33] This is the literal meaning of the Hebrew phrase here. There were three degrees of this "war ban," as it came to be called:

(a) This was the most severe. Every man, woman, and child was destroyed, and all of their property of every kind was destroyed and none of it was permitted to become spoil or booty for the victors.

(b) This second degree of the ban stopped with the destruction of all the people and permitted their property to become the spoil of the conquerors.

(c) This third degree issued in the destruction of all the men, the women and children, along with the property becoming the property and slaves of the victors.[34] The Deuteronomic law describing this is in Deuteronomy 20:10-15. It was the second of these bans that was executed against Sihon.