Capital Crimes (Part 3)

In parts one [1] and two [2] I analyzed and listed the 23 Biblical offenses eligible for or intrinsically deserving of the death penalty, and in this third and (perhaps) final part of the series I will provide more information on the nature and methods of capital punishment.

First of all, execution, or any other criminal punishment for that matter, was reserved exclusively for the civil government and could not be enacted without the testimony of two or three honest witnesses.


--Numbers 35:30--"But no one is to be put to death on the testimony of only one witness."

--Deuteronomy 17:6--"On the testimony of two or three witnesses a man shall be put to death, but no one shall be put to death on the testimony of only one witness."

--Deuteronomy 19:15--"One witness is not enough to convict a man of any crime or offense he may have committed.  A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses."


The honesty of the witnesses was crucial because if they maliciously contrived a story to illicitly frame an innocent person they would receive the exact penalty the crime they accused the other of would have been given (Deuteronomy 19:16-21).  There was to be no extra-legal killing by civilians other than proportionate self-defense in limited scenarios, like if a thief entered a home at night and the owner didn't know his or her intent (Exodus 22:2-3) and if someone was attempting to murder, kidnap, or rape the one acting in self-defense.  A civilian who killed another, even an unconvicted criminal, would be charged with murder on the testimony of two or three witnesses and executed himself or herself.  They would have violated the numerous warnings against vigilantism, revenge, and murder throughout the Mosaic Law.  Even "life for life" did not mean murder for murder.

The Bible is full of examples of people committing evils they should have been executed for.  Joseph's brothers kidnapped and sold him, and slave traders purchased him (Genesis 37).  Potiphar's wife falsely accused Joseph of rape, though she had perhaps almost raped him herself [3] (Genesis 39).  David and Bathsheba committed adultery together (2 Samuel 11).  Amnon raped his sister (2 Samuel 13).  Jezebel arranged for perjury that led to the execution of an innocent man named Naboth (1 Kings 21).  Mosaic Law would have appropriately condemned all of these depraved people to death.

Conservative evangelical Christians can often hold a very contradictory and hypocritical stance on capital punishment.  On one hand, many of them support it in the case of premeditated murder, citing passages like Exodus 21:12-14 as justification.  But they will likely also tell you that God has released people from an obligation to Mosaic Law, so sins like adultery and bestiality no longer deserve death inflicted by the civil government.  They may even trivialize rape and try to differentiate its severity from that of murder, though Deuteronomy 22:25-27 does the exact opposite.  But the whole time they are quoting part of Mosaic Law and the Old Testament to advocate the death penalty for murderers while rejecting the death penalty for most or all other capital crimes in the Bible, including crimes that can be far worse than any murder.  Kidnapping someone and confining or abusing them for years or even decades is far worse than murder, as are many instances of rape or gang-rape.  Torturing someone in certain ways or for certain durations of time is far worse than murder.  Yet conservatives (both political conservatives and conservative Christians) may disregard the Bible and reason and pretend that murder is the worst sin imaginable and that God only wants murder punished with death.

If capital punishment is sometimes just, how would
we know what crimes deserve the death penalty
apart from divine revelation?  Otherwise all we
are left with are subjective human opinions and
confliction perceptions.

Governments have employed a wide spectrum of grotesque methods of execution throughout history.  People, in the name of "justice", have committed atrocities like slowly excoriating the skin from a criminal's body, torturing people to death over a period of multiple days by crucifixion, allowing insects to slowly consume a live victim, dispatching animals to torment and kill criminals, and many other unjust forms of death, all inflicting the maximum level of cruelty and humiliation they thought necessary or enjoyable to participate in.  People in modern America can be of the false persuasion that all civil executions are barbarous and cruel, but they are only cruel when conducted in a sadistic and degrading manner or when applied to non-capital offenses.

So when people object to the stoning commanded in the Bible, they usually do so in ignorance of how cruel humans can truly become when they operate apart from Mosaic Law.  Stoning was not as harsh as it sounds to uneducated modern people, who sometimes assume it was artificially prolonged and engineered to be as painful as possible.  As the predominant method of death prescribed in Mosaic Law, it enabled the community to witness the punishment for certain evils.  The Bible mentions it in passages about the punishment for sorcery (Leviticus 20:27), incorrigible disobedience to parents (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), and sex with an engaged person (Deuteronomy 22:23-24).  It was usually quite brief, especially considering the way the Jews intended to carry it out.

Such extreme and gratuitous torture as found in the Gentile nations usually only results from either the elevation of deterrence to the main priority of justice or majority agreement that a particular instance of a crime is so heinous that it deserves a sadistic and prolonged punishment.  The Bible already has measures in place to prevent either of these from occurring.  Deterrence, while definitely present in Mosaic Law (Deuteronomy 19:20 and 21:21, for instance), is not the primary consideration in civil justice; it is more of a secondary benefit or side effect, with justice consisting almost wholly of what a crime deserves by nature of its depravity.  As for sating the peoples' appetite for punishment, Exodus 23:2 commands us to not follow the crowd in doing wrong and to not allow them to persuade us to pervert justice in any fashion, whether favoritism, bribery, barbarity, or letting a wicked person go free unpunished.  Anything that rests in the hands of the majority is not safe indeed.  So God already prepared laws anticipating both of these abominations.  If deterrence is all that matters, government agents could call for rape, sadism, complete degradation, inhumanity, punishment of relatives of the criminal, and the worst and longest of tortures.  If satisfying the fluctuating emotions of a crazed mass of people is the most important part of justice, then justice is relative to the majority's desires and therefore there is no such thing as objective justice.  Societal and emotional factors have led to people killing family members of a criminal, executing people for trivial or otherwise non-capital sins, and inflicting unimaginable torments on people.  God, on the contrary, says that justice cannot be determined or changed by the masses, that it is immutable, that a criminal who has committed a capital crime must die instead of his or her family members (Deuteronomy 24:16), and that punishment must not be degrading, inhumane, or excessive (Deuteronomy 25:1-3).

After death, Deuteronomy 21:22-23 permitted the corpse of a capital criminal to be temporarily displayed in public.  This was not intended to represent some sadistic and disrespectful act, but would serve as a potent warning to other men and women who viewed the body.  It would remind them that kidnapping, slave trading, murder, negligent homicide, adultery, bestiality, striking one's parent(s), sorcery, rape, and a handful of other crimes did carry the capital sentence and would therefore help with deterrence.  But even though the criminal was dead, God did not allow his or her body to remain displayed for longer than a day.  This, again, separates Israel's capital punishments from those of other nations, who disregarded the corpses of enemies and offenders and would let them be mutilated, consumed by animals, and insulted by others.

Although Biblical capital punishment (and other punishments) are
 routinely criticized or condemned by people who despise the
Bible, even the execution method of stoning sometimes
prescribed in, say, Deuteronomy, does not resemble the
gratuitous cruelty of pagan capital punishment methods
 like Assyrian flaying and Roman crucifixion.  Prolonged
torture, forced nudity, and post-mortem humiliation of
 corpses are never prescribed by the Bible and are
prohibited either explicitly by its laws or by extension
of them.

Humanity normally succumbs to error by making many crimes punishable by death or by trying to eradicate capital punishment from all but one crime or from existence.  In some cultures simple crimes like theft and trespassing have been punished by execution, while other societies have attempted to purge the entire concept from the legal system.  God clearly expresses displeasure at both extremes and did not leave the solution obscure or unknowable.  Capital punishment is most certainly an unalienable part of true justice, but its necessity and presence, like the necessity of all other forms of justice, should offer a sobering reminder of the corruption that can seize individuals and societies.


[1].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/07/capital-crimes-part-1.html

[2].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/07/capital-crimes-part-2.html

[3].  It is clear that Potiphar's wife had been sexually harassing Joseph for a prolonged period of time and there are numerous documented examples of female rape of males; the text of Genesis 39 definitely implies attempted rape-like behavior by Potiphar's unnamed wife.  Contrary to the assumed position that unthinking people accept blindly, it is neither impossible nor entirely uncommon for a woman to sexually assault and force herself sexually on a man.