The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History (7 page)

Slaves were also given protection from unwarranted abuse by their owners, but not surprisingly slaves had fewer rights than free men and women, particularly in regards to how serious an offence had to be in order to demand the death penalty. The death penalty could be incurred for a vast array of crimes including theft, knowingly receiving stolen goods, arson, kidnapping, harbouring run-away slaves, murder, adultery – surprisingly applicable to both men and women – and keeping a disreputable tavern. Of particular interest are such eye-for-an-eye punishments as being convicted of arson or robbing a house after a fire. In both cases the miscreant was to be thrown into a fire.

This image, albeit depicting a late medieval scene, shows the sort of ‘swimming’ prescribed by Hammurabi’s Code. The accused is bound hand and foot and thrown into the river. If they successfully manage to cross the open expanse of deep water and somehow crawl out on the opposite bank, they are deemed innocent. If they drown (as most surely did) then they were righteously found guilty.

For all of its primitive qualities, Babylonian justice under King Hammurabi was surprisingly even handed. No one could be convicted on less than rock-solid proof, perjurers were punished by having their tongue ripped out, and false-accusers were sentenced to the same punishment as their victim would have received had they been found guilty. Also well advanced for its time was the right of appeal; a right provided to all convicts regardless of their crime, and the appellate process went not only from local courts to higher courts, but could even be taken to the king himself and numerous surviving records show that Hammurabi often heard cases brought to him by common men and women of all walks of life.

Like their Egyptian and Babylonian neighbours, the ancient Hebrews codified their laws and tried to ensure that punishment remained within reasonable bounds. The Mosaic Code (the laws of Moses and his immediate successors) was laid down around 1200 BC and provided an elaborate system of punishment which included almost every type of torture known at the time. Like the Egyptians, with whom the Hebrews had a long and uneasy relationship, the most common form of civil punishment was flogging, but the number of lashes could never exceed forty. Among the list of capital crimes unique to Hebraic law were eating meat that still had blood in it, blasphemy, sacrificing children to pagan gods, pregnancy outside wedlock and sons refusing to obey their fathers’ commands.

While Hebrew law included such methods of execution as burning, being thrown from a high cliff and crucifixion, the most common form of judicially sanctioned death was stoning. All executions in early cultures were public affairs; the elaborate ceremonies and pain that accompanied them being intended to sufficiently impress the crowd that it would deter others from committing similar offences. Stoning was a particularly ceremonial affair. The condemned was taken to a place, beyond the city walls, reserved for this macabre spectacle. There, a pile of stones was always kept at the ready, presumably to remind passers-by of the serious import of the spot. The person who had brought the original charge against the condemned wore a white, fringed robe and was required to throw the first stone. Once the first rock had been cast, the rest of the crowd followed suit until the condemned was not only battered to death, but their body had completely disappeared beneath the mound of rocks.

Amazingly, although it has become almost uniquely associated with the Romans, crucifixion was a fairly common means of capital punishment among the early Jews, and there are numerous crucifixions – often referred to as ‘hanging from a tree’ – described in the Old Testament. The language of the Bible makes it difficult to decide whether some of these incidences included traditional hanging, or simply tying the victim to a tree and allowing them to die of exposure.

We think it would be fair to say that everyone (certainly in the western world) is familiar with the concept of crucifixion. There were varying methods of crucifixion which could be employed depending on how long the executioners intended to prolong the agony. Condemned criminals could be tied to the cross, nailed to the cross, or both. They could be given a platform on which to stand or not. They could be whipped, cut, etc. If one is simply staked out to die of exposure and suffocation it will take far longer than if one is beaten, flogged and stabbed and dying of blood loss.

In this image, the figure labeled ‘B’ is being sawn in half. Little explanation is necessary here to convey how agonizing and slow this would have been. Obviously this is a death sentence, but even once separated from his lower half like some horrid, grizzly, ancient magician’s trick, he would still have lived for some time until he eventually died of blood loss. Meanwhile, the figured labeled ‘A’ is about to receive the comparatively merciful sentence of decapitation.

One of the more bizarre, and rarer, forms of capital punishment among the Hebrew people was being buried alive; a particularly sadistic variant on this practice was to toss the victim into a tower of ashes. The tower in question had to be tall enough so the victim could be tossed into it and allowed to sink slowly into the choking ash, smothering to death in the process. Presumably there was some sort of ladder and platform allowing access to the tower and from which the death of the condemned could be viewed by the officials involved in the case, if not by the general public. During their long and turbulent history, the Hebrew tribes seem to have tried a vast variety of creative tortures. Prostitutes were routinely burned alive as were the daughters of priests found guilty of adultery. When King David (reigned 1005–965 BC) finally captured the city of Rabbah after a long and costly siege, he ordered the citizenry to be either sawn in half or buried up to their necks in the earth and have plows driven over them. Such incidents as David’s subjugation of Rabbah and tossing condemned criminals into towers of ash should not be viewed as generally accepted forms of punishment in ancient Judea. These were aberrations more akin to crimes of passion, or simple acts of sadism, than to the enforcement of the Mosaic Code.

These few grotesque instances aside, the Hebrews considered their system of justice and punishment as enlightened as their belief in one all-powerful God. Certainly, when relations with their neighbours broke down, as they often did, the punishments inflicted on the defeated Jews by their conquerors were at least as barbaric as those the Hebrews inflicted on their own criminals; but the outcome was not always as their persecutors intended.

When Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon invaded, and destroyed, the Hebrew Kingdom of Judea in 589 BC, he treated the Jews as a subjugated people. He did, however, raise a few of them to positions of responsibility in his government. Among those few were three men named Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. When Nebuchadnezzar built a golden idol (probably representing either Moloch or Baal) and commanded his subjects to worship it, these three civil servants refused and were subsequently hauled before the king. Their punishment for blasphemy was to be thrown into a furnace so hot that the guards assigned to stoke it were killed by the heat. According to the story, as related in the book of Daniel, an angel of the Lord saved the three Hebrews from being burnt and thereby causing Nebuchadnezzar to recognise the power of God. Only a generation later, Darius I of Persia had overrun Babylon, taken control of the displaced Hebrews and raised the prophet Daniel to a position of power in his court. When Daniel’s enemies at court spread seditious rumours against him, Darius believed the gossip and had Daniel thrown into a den of lions. The next day, Darius came to view the remains and found that Daniel had made friends with his feline companions, apparently thanks to God’s intervention. Realizing that a terrible mistake had been made, Darius released Daniel and had the man who brought the accusations against him driven into the lion’s den where, presumably, he was torn to shreds.

If ancient Judaic heroes like King David, King Saul, Gideon and Joshuah were warriors of great renown, the greatest warrior clan ever assembled by the Hebrews was undoubtedly the Maccabees. Between 165 and 63 BC the Maccabees attempted to re-establish the Kingdom of Judea by revolting against one of the most nefarious states of the Old Testament era, the Assyrians. To give you an idea of how fierce and barbaric a people the Assyrians were, consider that only a few centuries earlier, under the rule of Ashurbanipal (reigned 669–627 BC) the Assyrian army flayed captured enemy soldiers alive, and marked its trail of conquest with pyramids of decomposing human heads. Cities conquered by Ashurbanipal were subject to having their children burned alive and the (presumably few) surviving adults being blinded, flayed alive, impaled or having their hands, feet, ears and/or noses hacked off. Five centuries later, by the time of the Maccabeean uprising, the Assyrians were a bit more civilised but no more tolerant.

The Jews hated the Assyrians because they were a constant threat; the Assyrians hated the Jews because they stubbornly refused to be subjugated even in defeat. Finally, the Assyrian king, Antiochus Epiphanies, had had enough. He sacked Jerusalem, erected a statue of Jupiter in the inner sanctum of Solomon’s temple, turned the rest of the building into a brothel and ordered anyone observing the Sabbath to be burned alive. Instead of accepting their defeat, the Jews revolted; raising a rebel army under Judas Maccabaeus. These were the Maccabees.

This method of torture and execution took many forms. Sometimes the victims were staked out on the ground and a large wheel would be used to smash each of their limbs and joints including the hips and shoulders. In other cases, the victim was tied upon a wheel and the executioner would use bars, clubs or hammers to accomplish the same result. The idea was to break all of the bones in the body without breaking the skin or causing lethal injury. In either case, the shattered limbs of the victim were usually ‘laced’ through the spokes of the wheel and then mounted on a pole and displayed to the populace, where they would slowly and agonizingly die of hunger, thirst and exposure (and presumably, internal bleeding).