Bible Verses About Siege

When you approach a city to fight against it, you are to make an offer of peace.

If they accept your offer of peace and open their gates, all the people there will become forced laborers to serve you.

But if they refuse to make peace with you and wage war against you, lay siege to that city.

When you lay siege to a city for an extended time while fighting against it to capture it, you must not destroy its trees by putting an axe to them, because you can eat their fruit. You must not cut them down. Are the trees of the field human, that you should besiege them?

But you may destroy the trees that you know do not produce fruit. Use them to build siege works against the city that is waging war against you, until it falls.

Some time later, Ben-hadad king of Aram assembled his entire army and marched up to besiege Samaria.

So there was a great famine in Samaria. Indeed, they besieged the city so long that a donkey’s head sold for eighty shekels of silver, and a quarter cab of dove’s dung sold for five shekels of silver.

As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried out to him, “Help me, my lord the king!”

He answered, “If the LORD does not help you, where can I find help for you? From the threshing floor or the winepress?”

Then the king asked her, “What is the matter?” And she answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give up your son, that we may eat him, and tomorrow we will eat my son.’

So we boiled my son and ate him, and the next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son, that we may eat him.’ But she had hidden her son.”

By the ninth day of the fourth month, the famine in the city was so severe that the people of the land had no food.

They carve out what is on the right, but they are still hungry; they eat what is on the left, but they are still not satisfied. Each one devours the flesh of his own offspring.

I will camp in a circle around you; I will besiege you with towers and set up siege works against you.

But the Rabshakeh replied, “Has my master sent me to speak these words only to you and your master, and not to the men sitting on the wall, who are destined with you to eat their own dung and drink their own urine?”

So this is what the LORD says about the king of Assyria: ‘He will not enter this city or shoot an arrow into it. He will not come before it with a shield or build up a siege ramp against it.

I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh in the siege and distress inflicted on them by their enemies who seek their lives.’