"When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it"
This IMHO the key.
Once again the problem of understanding lost spiritual truths, if in fact there are any, the confusion of the "map for the territory". The giant historical game of religious "telephone" played from generation to generation introduces the basic error of substituting the outer for the inner. Just like the Bhagavad Gita, war and struggle are metaphors for the inner struggle and ways to overcome all the myriad inner distractions that keep one from discovering what is important spiritually.
Very little remains of these forgotten truths refereed to in these older writings.
The key is “As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul” – Hermes Trismegistus
Cities, vineyards, kingdoms,. servants and slaves, are common in old mythology are external "models" often used by the originators of various religious scriptures to point to inner processes. in a sense early use fractals.
The crude literal destroys the metaphorical. So go easy on Deuteronomy
We are a leaf or a smaller branch of a tree
