A Closer Look at Judaism and Capital Punishment

The Torah commands the death penalty for a variety of offenses, while the Talmud puts strict, sometimes impossible-seeming, limits on this penalty’s applicability. Often discussions of Jewish views of capital punishment cite the opinions of rabbis who, in practical terms, opposed the death penalty, alongside that of another who warned of the dangers of such leniency. But such summaries only scratch the surface. Daniel Z. Feldman takes a deeper look at attitudes toward the most severe of punishments in medieval and ancient rabbinic thought. He then addresses how Jewish belief in repentance squares with the rabbinic rejection of remorse as a mitigating factor in capital cases: