Sefer HaChinuch ספר החינוך

The burning of an enticed city and to kill its people: To burn an enticed city and everything that is in it. And a city of Israel [whose inhabitants] have been enticed by wanton men to leave from under the wings of the Divine Presence, and go after the whims of their hearts to worship idolatry, is called an enticed city. And about this is it stated (Deuteronomy 13:17), “and you shall burn the city with fire, and all of its booty.”

The root of this commandment is well-known — that evil and sinful men like this that agreed [upon] a bad and disgusting agreement like this together are fit to have their name erased and their memory destroyed from the world, and that there should not be a place of their remembrance in the world at all. And there is no destruction more complete than burning.

From the laws of the commandment is that which they, may their memory be blessed, said (Sanhedrin 111b) that the city does not become an enticed city — meaning, to judge them with the law of an enticed city, the people of which are killed with the sword and their property is burned with the city — until its enticers are two, or more than two, as it is stated (Deuteronomy 13:14), “Wanton men came out, etc.”; and that its enticers are from that tribe and from that city, as it is stated, “from among you, and entice you”; and until they entice its majority, and that the enticed be from one hundred up to the majority of the tribe. But if the majority of a tribe is enticed, they are not judged by the law of the enticed city, but rather as individuals who are stoned and their property is for their heirs, as it is stated, “the residents of the city” — and not a small village and not a large [metropolis], and less than a hundred is a small village, and the majority of a tribe is a large [metropolis]. And the law that a city of refuge and so [too,] Jerusalem, cannot be made an enticed city, and so [too,] a city that is on the border cannot be made an enticed city; the law of how we make it into an enticed city, and the warning that we send to it through two Torah scholars; that which they said concerning its plaza; that which they said about the properties of the righteous within it who were not enticed with it; the law of consecrated things within it; the law of the fruit of palm trees within it; the law of the properties of the people of another city that are within it or the properties of the people of the enticed city in another place; and the rest of its details are [all] in Tractate Sanhedrin (Chapter 11).

And this commandment is practiced by males — as justice is theirs — and at the time that Israel is on its Land and that the Great Court of seventy-one [judges] is in its place, since we only judge an enticed city through the Great Court. And it is from the commandments that are incumbent upon the community, and [especially] on the Sanhedrin. And if they transgressed this — for example, they knew about one of the cities of Israel that was fitting to be made into an enticed city, and they did not effect the law of the enticed city upon it — they have violated this positive commandment, and their punishment is very great, lest its evil spread to other cities.