The Great Physician XIV: Capital Punishment

Well, in a way, taking a person’s life amounts to a termination of said life and can technically be considered medical in nature. Because it is death prescribed by Biblical law as punishment it should not be viewed as murder or even killing but willful termination (by the state/priesthood) of a life through prescribed means as recompense of a divine legal infraction. Why capital punishment? Because usually someone knowledgeable about body and life would need to ascertain whether or not that body or life ceased. That usually required a physician or priest.

There appear to be generally (5) five types of offences codified by Levitical Law and punishable by death. These are further broken down into explicit sins and infractions of the law.

1. Offences against persons.

2. Offences involving property

3. Defiance of authority

4. Religious offences

5. Procedural requirements

Category 1 (and to a lesser extent category 4) concerns imposition of the capital punishment or כרת kareth (which is Hebrew for cutting-off [one’s life]) for infractions of the purity laws.  There is biblical justification for the death penalty in:

Murder (Exodus 21:12; Leviticus 24:17)

Manslaughter (Numbers 35;16-18)

Kidnapping (Deuteronomy 24:7)

Death by negligence/neglect (Exodus 21:29–31)

Sorcery (Exodus 22:17)

Rape (Deuteronomy 22:23–27)

Adultery-Both parties executed (Leviticus 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:22)

Harlotry, singular case where the offender is daughter of a priest (Leviticus 21:9)

Incest (Leviticus 18:6, with one’s father’s wife 20:11,80)

Homosexuality (Leviticus 20:13)

Bestiality (Leviticus 20:15–16).

It is particularly difficult to draw generalizations from all of this other than to say that the death penalty is reserved by God in the Law for exceptionally heinous sins in terms of either infractions towards God or infractions to other people. The Law was more concerned with offences against the person due to the wholeness holiness factor of the individual and community. 

Overwhelmingly capital punishment was reserved for infractions of a sexual nature. This fit in well with their stringent application of the purity/impurity laws.  The method of formal execution is not clear though in some cases burning and stoning were specifically prescribed. The other thing that should be clearly noted is that no specific sexual infraction was more heinous than another. They were all sins therefore affronts to God. They were all viewed as offensive to God. Whether it be adultery, homosexuality or bestiality.

The term kareth כרת does not always refer to the process of execution itself but rather to the cutting off of the individual from society, his family and his lineage. The terms ‘extirpation’ and ‘eradication’ and ‘uprooting’ have all been widely used as a translation of כרת but ‘eradication’ and ‘uprooting’ seem quite inappropriate inasmuch as uprooting is quite different from cutting off.  There is no suggestion that lineage in any way deleted via death. It is the perpetrators personal attachment to it that is to be ended.  This implies uprooting and separation from one’s root-stock.  Exile. The problem with exile in the old testament period is that it essentially acted as a death penalty for those outside of their societal protection. Especially for a woman at that time. The same as excommunication was a death sentence for a believer in 1 Corinthians 5. In the end spiritual death is vastly worse than physical death.