NUM170 In a world where life was cheap and Jewish lives considered [by non-Jewish sovereigns] of virtually no worth whatsoever, it is even less surprising that Jews were extremely reluctant to seek death as a means to punish other Jews. Even a casual reader of the Torah, however, would discover that Jewish tradition considered capital punishment to be an unremarkable part of the Jewish justice system. The death penalty was prescribed for a whole range of offenses that would seem to us to be fairly petty crimes, or hardly criminal at all. In Numbers 15:32-35, for instance, God tells Moses to stone to death a man who was discovered gathering wood on Shabbat. Certainly, though, the untimely clearing of brush is not considered a criminal offense, capital or otherwise, in any state that I have ever heard of. For a civilization that so highly values life, this carelessness with capital punishment stands out at best as an anachronism, and at worst as a moral failing that calls into question that compassion and love of the divine author of Jewish law. The Rabbis apparently agreed with that assessment and went to considerable lengths to read capital punishment out of the Torah. They parsed the verses with precision to restrict capital punishment to rare cases. For example, they defined the “disloyal and defiant” son who was to be publicly put to death as required by Deuteronomy 21:21, as being a male who was disobedient after eating gluttonously from partially cooked meat and making himself drunk on partially diluted wine. Even then, he was still only considered a “disloyal and defiant” son if he had eaten the meat and gotten drunk in the first three months after turning thirteen years of age, and only if the wine and meat were purchased cheaply with stolen money--and so forth. The requirements that the Rabbis constructed from their careful reading of just a few verses in the Torah lead them to conclude that there never was, nor would there ever be, a situation in which a “disloyal and defiant” son could be lawfully executed. The early Rabbis did not see themselves as being empowered to change the substantive law. To them, the Torah was God-given and of unquestionable authority, defining offenses and setting their punishments. But the Rabbis could and did alter procedural requirements to tilt the playing field sharply against the imposition of capital punishment. In the oft-quoted formulation from the Mishnah from Makkot 1:10, if a court imposed more than one death sentence in seven years, it was considered murderous. Another Rabbi responded that if a court imposed more than one such sentence in seventy years, it was to be considered murderous. Rabbi Akiva and his colleague Rabbi Tarfon, both giants of the early Rabbinic era, then stated that had they been members of the court, no defendant would ever have been executed. And yet, the last word in this Mishnah was given to Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel, who became the president of the Sanhedrin (the rabbinic High Court) and was a key figure in the formation of post-Temple Judaism. He said of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon that “they too increase the murderers in Israel.” With that, the Mishnah turned its attention to other matters, leaving later generations to draw their own conclusions about a question that was not practical, but entirely academic, given the lack of a properly constituted rabbinic court sitting in session on the steps of a functioning “Third Temple” in Jerusalem. According to Jewish tradition, only such a court could properly render a capital verdict.