Julian

Response to Julius:

There is nothing wrong with making a death penalty fearful. But in order to undertake it you must arrive at it beyond any reasonable doubt and the bible doesn't seem to provide for that.

Saying that strong penalties deter people from committing the crime is not evidenced by history or contemporary accounts.

You say that people leave their shops unattended, maybe this is true. Yet I also know that people are regularly caught stealing and they do have their hand cut off. It has been shown that the death penalty is not a very good deterrent against crime, just look at the US.

My problem is not with the punishment in the bible, it is the flimsy circumstances under which it can be incurred. I am also concerned with the mentality of people who can write up such laws. What does it say about their personalities? Now, you say that they had a good legal system, maybe that's so. You also say that bad children were never put to death. How do you know this? How do you know they put few people to death? Do you have criminal statistics from that period?

You paint a very rosy picture but I would need substantial documentation for me to buy into it. So far I just have your opinion, and you may just be completely correct, but I will need something more.

It begs the question, if they never enforced the bad child law, then why was it still in there?

Julian

andrewcriddle

Rabbinic tradition imposed such stringent rules about the interpretation of the 'rebellious son' passage as to make it almost impossible for anyone to be convicted as a rebellious son.

In Tosefta Sanhedrin 11:6 we actually have How far this represents the position before 70 CE is another matter.

IMHO the original purpose of the passage in Deuteronomy 21 18-21 was to prevent a father killing his rebellious son on his own initiative without reference to the local magistrates.

Andrew Criddle

Julian

After the destruction of the temple, and probably since Quirinius, I am sure that those laws would have been hard to carry out, but assuming that D. was written during Josiah we are looking at several centuries where things were undoubtedly somewhat less civilized. Again, we can never know. But if it was never enforced, then why put it in there?

BTW, wasn't the death penalty under the control of the Romans? I.e. only the Romans could sentence someone to death in their provinces?

How many fathers want to kill a rebellious son? Maybe they would for inheritance issues, honor, and who knows what else. Maybe the law was there to enable the father 'select' an appropriate heir. I don't know. All I know is that I find the laws distateful regardless of whether or not they were properly enforced. This is more about the (lack of) humanity in the Tanakh than the reality of Jewish jurisprudence.

Julian

Julius

I beg your indulgence, Julian, since I would like to find reputable sources on the internet to answer your many questions instead of quoting from books. I found a good source to answer one of your questions.
The website is copyrighted so I won't be cutting and pasting from it. Instead, I give you the url:

http://www.torah.org/learning/olas-s...8/kisetze.html

The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 71a) affirms what I said, that no such case has ever been where a disobedient child was punished. In Jewish law, usually there are legal precedents which can be consulted; but this particular law has no precedent if such a case did arise.

The Sanhedrin, early on, curbed the potential unmerciful application of this law by applying it only to males since the text says "ben" or "son." Other restrictions followed. Those you can read about at another site:

http://www.torahaura.com/Bible/Learn..._ki_tetze.html

That site says one Rabbi disagreed, saying he had seen one son executed; but he was surely in the minority opinion....

It also gives you an answer to your question, "Why have such a law?" Their explanation may not make the best of sense to you, however, I will concede. Let me give it a shot. The courts, and particularly the Sanhedrin, were to derive the basic principles from the laws given in the Torah and to apply them in the current context. Thus, one law, such as not cutting one's hair like pagan priests, could be interpreted in many ways. (One of those ways is that Jews do not bring flowers to funerals--not because the Torah forbids the practice explicitly, but because Christians do this; and they do not want to be seen as imitating Christians.) Today, those pagan priests no longer exist; and most Jews do not retain the sidecurls since trimming their sideburns is not imitating pagan priests. Yet some Jews do not trim and retain the sidecurls. There has not been a sitting Sanhedrin in nearly 2000 years; and perhaps the newly constituted one will begin to make rulings on such matters; but until they do, each Jew can follow his conscience.

So the law is not there necessarily to be used to put anyone to death. I daresay just having such a law would curb many potentially deliquent children. The Romans had a similar law, also infrequently used; but it was more severe. The Jewish law is mild by comparison. Any Roman patriarch had the right of life and death; and he did not have to answer to anyone about it. The genteel way to be rid of "bad children" was usually starvation, as was the case of Julia, daughter of Augustus and his first wife Scribonia. Married off to Tiberius, in an attempt to secure a secure transition of power, she was unhappy in this marriage--as was Tiberius who had been forced to divorce a wife he was happy with--and Julia fell into "wanton ways." It may have been kinder to stone her! She was starved slowly--it took about 12 years before she died of malnutrition. She may have envied the fate of the the Vestal Virgin found guilty of imappropriate sexual behavior--Cornelia was walled up and starved in short order while her lovers were beaten to death.

So I would say that the Jewish law on this was quite mild in comparison to the standards of the day; and it became even milder as the Sanhedrin made it more and more difficult to take this law as an easy way of getting rid of naughty children.

You have asked several questions I find germane and which I hope to answer; and I shall continue to try to find appropriate sources for you. The difficulty of the matter in doing word searches lies in large part--to be honest about it--with weeding out the many Christian sites and Messianic Jewish ones which often have dubious opinions about Jewish law.

Let me conclude by giving my own take on the matter. Much of Judaism revolves around the necessity of mercy and forgiveness; and it is also a good lesson for children to know their parents have the right to have them killed but don't.

Joan of Bark

There are two problems with this thinking. As Julian has pointed out, there seems to be no correlation between the death penalty and the crime rate in the western world. Those who commit capital crimes either A) don't think they will be caught, or B) are in a frame of mind where they don't care or aren't thinking rationally (when a man comes home to find his wife in bed with another man, he probably doesn't say to himself, "hmm, better not kill this guy, because I might be given the death penalty")

The other problem is that mistakes can be made by the system and result in the wrong person being executed. Not only is this a huge miscarriage in justice, but since the supposed killer has been found, the case will never be re-opened and the real culprit will get off scott free.

Casper

I think there is a whole lot of wisdom to be gained form this analogy. Think about it; the story represents a conundrum that perplexes the elders. Such a precedent is condered important to include. Does this point to a more hellenistic period with regard to women's rights?