Welcome to Douglas Wilson's The Plodcast, presented by Canon Press.

Yeah. Yes, God, God, God don't never change.

So welcome to the

to the podcast my name is Douglas Wilson. This is episode

292. I received a question recently about

Ukraine not about the but simply over the fact that the United States appears to be more and more involved in it.

We've provided lots of money, lots and lots of money, and weapons systems and so on, and the war continues to drag on, right? And I was asked recently, what about

conscription?

Suppose we get dragged into a war

such that ground forces, American ground forces,

are committed and let's say things go haywire and the draft comes up.

So what do I think about the draft?

What do I think about conscription?

If we look at biblical law, one of the things that we can see is that under the mosaic code,

it was legitimate for the magistrate to muster all the troops. So if you were of combat age and Israel you had to be 20 years old,

20 years old and up. I think maybe it went up to 50 but if you were in that age cohort if you were

of a warrior's age you could be mustard if there was a war brewing or if invasion was imminent or something was happening

the king or whoever the existing authority was could muster the troops and gather everybody together and count noses.

And, but then here's the interesting thing.

In Moses Israel, they did not have mandatory service. In other words,

you could not conscript someone to go to war. You could muster them and see that they were there, but if they were, if they were

recently married, they could be allowed, they got an exemption, they could return

...