Shoftim's rules of warfare exempt from military service anyone who has built a new house not yet dedicated, planted a vineyard not yet enjoyed, become betrothed but not yet married, or simply become afraid (Deuteronomy 20:5-8), a set of exemptions commentators read as unusually protective of ordinary civilian life and morale by the standards of ancient warfare, prioritising completed personal milestones and even psychological readiness over maximising available manpower.
The same chapter forbids destroying fruit trees when besieging a city, asking rhetorically 'is the tree of the field a man, that it should be besieged by you' (Deuteronomy 20:19-20), a provision later Jewish law expanded far beyond literal siege warfare into the broader principle of bal tashchit, a general prohibition against wasteful or needless destruction of anything of value, cited in later rabbinic and modern Jewish environmental and ethical writing well outside its original wartime context.
Shoftim's requirement of two or three witnesses to establish any capital charge (Deuteronomy 17:6, restated at 19:15), with a single uncorroborated accusation explicitly insufficient regardless of how credible it appears, became a foundational evidentiary principle in later Jewish law. Its wording is echoed directly in the New Testament, where 2 Corinthians 13:1 and 1 Timothy 5:19 both invoke the same two-or-three-witness standard when addressing internal church discipline many centuries later.