The capital punishment next in severity, was burning. "They set the malefactor in dung up to the knees, and then tied a towel about his neck, which was drawn by the two witnesses, till they made his mouth gape, into which they poured melted lead down his throat, which consumed his bowels. This was called by the Jews, the burning of the soul; but as the same word is used to signify the burning of combustible matter which is cast into the fire, it is supposed that such a method was sometimes practised, which is called by the Jews the burning of the body, and was probably the death to which the patriarch Judah condemned Tamar his daughter-in-law: "Bring her forth, and let her be burnt."d

Others were condemned to be slain with the sword, which was by decapitation, executed in the manner used in modern times. Such was the punishment which David inflicted on the Amalekite, for putting Saul to death. It seems also to be the usual punishment in Abyssinia, for taking away the life of a king; for Socinios, an Abyssinian monarch, being informed, that one Mahardin, a Moor, had been the first to break through that respect due to a king, by wounding Za Denghel, his predecessor, at the battle of Bartcho, he ordered him to be brought at noonday, before the gate of his palace, and his head to be then struck off with an axe, as a just atonement for violated majesty. The punishment of strangling, as described by the Jewish writers, resembled the Turkish punishment of the bow-string, rather than the present mode of executing by the gibbet. The offender was placed up to the loins in dung, and a napkin was twisted about his neck, and drawn hard by the witnesses, till he was dead,

◄ Gen. xxxviii, 24. Lewis Origines Hebrææ, vol. i, p. 76.

e Bruce's Trav. vol. ii, p. 262. Lewis Origines Hebrææ, vol. i, p. 77.

Those who had committed great and notorious offences, and who deserved to be made public examples, were hanged upon a tree after they had actually suffered the death to which they were condemned; which shews, that this punishment was not the same with the Roman crucifixion, in which the malefactors were nailed to the gibbet, and left to expire by slow and excruciating torments. The Hebrew custom was no more than hanging up their bodies after they were dead, and exposing them for some time to open shame. For this purpose, a piece of timber was fixed in the ground, out of which came a beam, to which the hands of the sufferer were tied, so that his body hung in the posture of a person on the cross. When the sun set, the body was taken down; for the law says, "He that is hanged on a tree, is accursed of God;" not that the criminal was accursed because he was hanged, but he was hanged because he was accursed.

In the time of execution, they gave the malefactor a grain of frankincense in a cup of wine, in order to stupify and render him less sensible of pain. This custom is traced to the charge of the wise man: "Give strong drink to him that is ready to perish, and wine to those that be of heavy hearts." The prophet makes an allusion to the powerful effects of this stupifying draught, in that prediction which announces the judgements of God upon the empire of Babylon: "Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations to whom I send thee, to drink it. And they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad, because of the sword that I will send among them."h Hence the Jews, according to the custom of their country, gave our Lord wine mingled with myrrh at his crucifixion;

f Lewis Origines Hebrææ, vol. i, p. 75.

h Jer. xxv, 15, 16. * Prov. xxxiv, 6. Lewis Origines Hebrææ, vol. i, p. 72.

but, besides the medicated draught, in derision of his kingly character, they offered him vinegar mingled with gall, instead of sweet wine, which was the drink of orienta. sovereigns. The first cup might seem to indicate some degree of compassion in his enemies, but the next was a cruel insult to the unoffending sufferer.

But besides these capital punishments that were inflicted by the Jews according to their law, the sacred writers allude to several kinds of death to which malefactors were condemned in Syria and the circumjacent countries, of which the laws of Moses take no notice. One of these was the punishment of drowning, which was frequently imposed by the ancient Syrians. The criminal had a heavy weight put about his neck, or was rolled up in a

sheet of lead, and cast into a river or into the sea. Such is the account which our Lord himself gives of this punishment: "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones who believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

In his prediction relative to the destruction of the temple, in another part of the same gospel, he makes an allusion to the horrible punishment of cutting a living criminal asunder, which, according to some writers, was sometimes inflicted in Judea, and in particular, suffered by the prophet Isaiah under the bloody reign of Manasseh: "The Lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of, and shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrite." Many instances occur in ancient writers, of this method of executing criminals; and from Dr. Shaw J Matt. xxiv, 50, 51.

Matt. xviii, 6.

Pari

and other modern travellers we learn, that it is still in use among some nations, particularly the western Moors in Barbary. It is thought to have come originally from Persia or Chaldea; and it certainly corresponds with the barbarous dispositions which those bitter and hasty nations too much indulged. Calmet informs us, that not many years ago, the Swiss executed this terrible punishment in the plain of Grenelles, near Paris, on one of their own countrymen who had been guilty of a great crime. They put him into a coffin and sawed him at length, beginning at the head, as a piece of wood is sawn. sates the king of Persia, caused Roxana to be sawn in two alive. According to Windus, the same dreadful punishment is often inflicted in Morocco, where the criminal is put between two boards, and sawn from the head downwards till the body fall in two pieces. The laws of the twelve tables, which the Romans borrowed from the Greeks, condemned certain malefactors to the punishment of the saw; but the execution of it was so rare, that, according to Aulus Gellius, none remembered to have seen it practised. But in the time of Caligula the emperor, many people of rank and fortune were condemned to be sawn in two through the middle.TM

The Greeks and Romans condemned some of their criminals to be cast down from the top of a rock." In the time of Pitts, the inhabitants of Constantine, a town in Turkey, built on the summit of a great rock, commonly executed their criminals who had been guilty of more atrocious crimes, by casting them headlong from the cliff.o

Shaw's Trav. vol. i, p. 456, 457.
Journey to Mequinez, p. 157.

m

n Potter's Gr. Antiq. vol. i, p. 134.
• Trav.
p. 10.

Suetonius, lib. iv, sec. 26.

This punishment Amaziah the king of Judah inflicted on ten thousand Edomites whom he had taken captive in war: "Other ten thousand left alive, did the children of Judah carry away captive, and brought them to the top of the rock, and cast them down from the top of the rock, and they were all broken in pieces."

Pounding in a mortar is a punishment still used among the Turks. The Ulemats, or body of lawyers, in Turkey, are by law secured in two important privileges-they cannot lose their goods by confiscation, nor can they be put to death except by the pestle and mortar. The guards of the towers who suffered prince Coreskie to escape from prison, were, some of them impaled, and others pounded or beaten to pieces in great mortars of iron, by orders of the Turkish government. This dreadful punishment appears to have been occasionally imposed by the Jewish rulers, for Solomon clearly alludes to it in one of his Proverbs: "Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him."r

The head, the hands, and the feet of state criminals, were often cut off, and fixed up in the most public places, as a warning to others. This shocking custom is not unknown in the criminal proceedings of countries which lie at a great distance from Palestine. It may be traced up to a very remote antiquity, for the sacred historian informs us, that David commanded the hands and feet of the sons of Rimmon, who treacherously murdered Ishbosheth, to be cut off, and hung up over the pool of Hebron.s

Another mode of capital punishment, to which the in

p 2 Chron. xxv, 12.

Du Tott's Mem. vol. i, p. 65.

r Prov. xxvii, 22.

$ 2 Sam. iv, 12.