This paper will provide an analysis of ten Talmudic passages dealing with the issue of capital punishment, in order to demonstrate how the rabbis of the first two centuries C.E. ôbuilt a fence around the Lawö (the famous third precept stated in Pirke Avoth) in order to adapt the Draconian prescriptions inherited from a far more primitive era to the conditions and society of their own time. Most of the passages will be drawn from Sanhedrin, with a few contrasting ones drawn from other tractates.
The starting point for this line of thought could be almost any one of the Torah passages that prescribe the death penalty for some infraction against people or God. It is well-known that Torah, especially Leviticus, has many such ôeye-for-an-eyeö prescriptions, and these are still often thrown in the teeth of Jews as showing that Judaism is ôanti-humanö or some similar bigoted bilge. The irony is, of course, that the Rabbis who were the founders of what became mainstream Judaism were perfectly well aware how anachronistic such laws were, and even of how anachronistic the Temple sacrifices themselves were, by the time of the Roman occupation, and their major concern was how to reinterpret these and other laws in a way that did not negate them, but adapted them to a more ômodernö era. The effort to continue such interpretation is, of course, on-going. Judaism could probably not survive without such continual growth and adaptation to an ever-changing world.
The Tanaitic interpretation of such passages led to the ethical insight that one is not only permitted but obligated to violate any mitzvah in order to save a human life, which has ever since remained the central ethical precept of mainstream Judaism. This insight in practice led to the further insight that one could often save a human life by violating the mitzvah that commanded the death penalty. Hence much of the Gemara on such passages are concerned with finding counte...