Attack a city; if they surrender, they are your slaves; if they resist, kill the men and keep the rest as slaves (Deut 20:10-15). Female war captives can be taken as wives, or must be released if not wanted (Deut 21:10-14).

Deuteronomy 20:10-15 applies specifically to 'cities that are very far from you,' outside the land itself (v. 15 explicitly distinguishes this from the harsher herem-cities of Canaan addressed separately, v. 16-18, which is not part of this claim). Surrender terms converted the population into forced labor (tributary service) rather than the alternative the law assumes as background: the actual ANE default of siege warfare was mass slaughter, mutilation, and deportation regardless of surrender terms, as attested in Assyrian royal annals; the surrender clause functions as a mitigating option layered onto that norm, not an innovation of it. Deuteronomy 21:10-14 requires real concession: taking a female war captive as a wife, in a context of extreme power imbalance and no expressed personal consent, is deeply troubling by any modern standard, and no comparative framing should soften that basic fact. What can honestly be added is that the text imposes specific, legally enforceable restrictions on existing ANE conquest custom that are easy to miss: a mandatory month-long mourning period before any sexual contact is permitted (v. 13), during which she mourns her parents — a humanizing delay with no ANE parallel; the removal of captive markers (shaved head, trimmed nails, changed clothes) as ritual acts of transition rather than display; and decisively, v. 14: 'if you are not pleased with her, you must let her go wherever she wishes; you must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.' That clause is a real, binding restriction unparalleled in surrounding ANE conquest law — it forecloses exactly the outcome (resale into ordinary chattel slavery after use) the objection assumes is the endpoint, converting what ANE custom treated as permanent spoil-of-war into either full marriage with inheritance status or complete, unconditional manumission, with resale explicitly criminalized.

As with the slavery case law more broadly (see sex-slavery-003), the pattern here is restriction layered onto an existing fallen practice of warfare the text does not invent, consistent with the 'hardness of heart' accommodation principle Jesus names for a structurally similar case (Matt 19:8).