Anat

Well, I found a source. from How is a person stoned to death?
The Mishna in Tractate Sanhedrin teaches:

"The stoning building is two stories. One of the witnesses pushes him [the victim off of the building] onto his back...."

The Mishna goes on to teach that if the victim doesn't die from the fall, then the other witness throws a stone onto him, and if this doesn't do the trick, then all of Israel stone him.
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Regardless of the Sinai story, the Mishna above was closer in time to the time when Jesus was supposed to have lived and is likely to describe the custom of that time.

B_Sharp

* sigh *

Nice to reminisce about the good ol' days. :rolling:

Amen-Moses

Actually it was far more barbaric, a very slow and painful death lasting many hours. I saw it on an archeological documentary but they didn't specify if it was a Roman or Jewish punishment only that it was practiced that way in the 1st century. I believe their evidence came from written accounts of the time, possibly Josephus or Philo?

It reminded me of the punishment I read about from India where they would put wooden planks over the top of a criminal (for murder or treason I believe) and make Elephants walk across them, not sure what the Elephants thought about it though!

Amen-Moses

MortalWombat

We also know that the authors of both the Gospel of John (“If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.� in John 8) and the Acts of the Apostles (re: the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7, where it describes Stephen calling out and then falling to his knees while being stoned) seemed to indicate that it was a stone-throwing activity. These two books were a little closer to the time of Jesus.

MortalWombat

I was speaking about throwing someone off a cliff, which is less tortuous than either throwing stones at a person or crushing them slowly. In any event, I have provided 3 examples from the bible in my posts above where it is either strongly implied or outright stated that casting stones was the activity, for whatever that's worth.

Amen-Moses

The documentary I watched used the evidence from bones and they were very convincing.

I think maybe there was different methods used depending on who the criminal was, i.e a local stoning may very well have been a rather ad-hoc affair but I can't see it being very efficient unless the victim is immobalised somehow, otoh a high visibility criminal after having been tried would probably have encountered the more orderly stoning method.

Amen-Moses

Diogenes the Cynic

From what I've read about this, the victim was first pushed off a cliff or some other high place and then the stones were used as a coup de gras.

If you think about it, it would be kind of hard to actually stone them to deathe by surrounding them and throwing rocks unless you had a good sized mob. The victim isn't just going to stand there and I could think of all kinds of way to wreak havoc if I were in that situation. You could charge into the crowd and hide behind other people or brawl with them. You could pick up rocks and throw them back (I would be looking to at least get a few good shots in). You could duck and dodge and let people hit each other with their own crossfire.

Tossing them off a cliff first makes the work a lot easier and cuts down on the chances of the stoners getting clocked in the head with one of their own rocks or kicked in the nuts by a vindictive target with nothing to lose.

ohwilleke

Talk about blame the victim.

B_Sharp

Islamics today bury people in the ground up to their necks and then slowly stone you to death. It is done to disobedient women. Good luck trying to run away.

Calzaer

I seem to remember a video making the e-mail rounds a couple years ago that was allegedly taken off of Al-Jazeera and showed a veil-free woman being stoned to death (as in, rocks thrown at her) by an angry mob... I may be misremembering tho.