The sentence of beheading was executed thus:--They sometimes cut off the criminal's head with a sword, as is done among the Romans. But Rabbi Yehudah says this was degrading, and in some cases they placed the culprit's head upon the block and struck it off with an ax. Some one remarked to him that such a death is more degrading still.
The sentence of strangling was carried out thus:--They fixed the criminal up to his knees in manure, and having twined a hard cloth within a soft one round his neck, one witness pulled one way and the other pulled in an opposite direction till life was extinct.
_Sanhedrin_, fol. 42, col. 2; fol. 49, col. 2; fol. 52, cols. 1, 2.
The above, which has been translated almost literally from the Talmud, may serve to remove many misconceptions now current as to the modes of capital punishment that obtained in Jewry.
In further illustration of this topic, we will append some of the legal decisions that are recorded in the Talmud, authenticating each by reference to folio and column. Examples might be multiplied by the score, but a sufficient number will be quoted to give a fair idea of Rabbinic jurisprudence.
If one who intends to kill a beast (accidentally) kill a man; or if, purposing to kill a Gentile, he slay an Israelite; or if he destroy a foetus in mistake for an embryo, he shall be free; i.e., not guilty.
He who has been flogged and exposes himself again to the same punishment is to be shut up in a narrow cell, in which he can only stand upright, and be fed with barley till he burst.
If one commits murder, and there is not sufficient legal evidence, he is to be shut up in a narrow cell and fed with "the bread of adversity and the water of affliction" (Isa. xxx. 20). They give him this diet till his bowels shrink, and then he is fed with barley till (as it swells in his bowels) his intestines burst.
A woman who is doomed, being _enceinte_, to suffer the extreme penalty of the law, is first beaten, about the womb, lest a mishap occur at the execution.
If a woman who has vowed the vow of a Nazarite drink wine or defile herself by contact with a dead body (see Num. vi. 2-6), she is to undergo the punishment of forty stripes.
The Rabbis teach that when the woman has to be flogged, the man has only to bring a sacrifice; and that if she is not to be flogged, the man is not required to bring a sacrifice. (This is in reference to Lev. xix. 20, 21.)