That Never Occurred To Me

As I was doing some read­ing in the Dic­tio­nary of the Old Tes­ta­ment: Pen­ta­teuch, a thought jumped out at me in the arti­cle Fam­i­ly Rela­tion­ships: ston­ing is a unique form of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment because it requires the entire com­mu­ni­ty to accept the respon­si­bil­i­ty for putting some­one to death and it pre­vents any one per­son from hav­ing to serve as the exe­cu­tion­er. It’s like a fir­ing squad that way. I won­der how the debate on the death penal­ty woud change if we each had to help exe­cute con­victs…