68 Rabbi Richard A. Block
became impossible, Jewish tradition provides an extra-judicial avenue to rectify the matter. Thus, wholly apart from the Jewish court system, tradition confers on the monarch the authority to administer what Maimonides calls din ha-malkhut, i.e.,“the sovereign’s justice.”?® Unlike a bet din, a Jewish monarch is empowered to act for the benefit of society by executing criminals even when the crime is not a capital offense under biblical law.” In addition, the monarch is not bound by the strict laws of evidence to which the Jewish court is subject. Thus, for example, the monarch can impose the death penalty on the basis of one witness or a confession.” Whether circumstantial evidence is a sufficient basis for capital punishment as an exercise of sovereign justice is not clear,# but even without clear proof or warning, “the king has authority to execute[a criminal] and to perfect the world in accordance with what the hour requires.”® As Rabbi David Bleich observes,“Jewish law provides... in effect... two separate systems of justice and two parallel judiciaries.”!
Ultimately, the best evidence of Jewish legal practice is derived not from legislation, but from history. The Mishnah indicates that persons charged with capital offenses were sometimes executed, even if hatra’ah had not occurred or there were evidentiary problems, so long as the court was certain of guilt.” The Tal mud also informs us that after Jewish courts lost the authority to impose capital punishments, murderers were turned over to civil authorities for execution,®® a practice that continued into the Middle Ages.*
Finally, capital punishment was carried out by Jewish authorities, both before and after 70 C.D.E., when it was possible, whether strictly in accordance with the law or not.* To cite but a few examples, the Talmud recounts a man being stoned to death “in the Greek period” for riding a horse on Shabbat. * In another instance, a woman and a young man whom she had raised from infancy were brought to a bet din and stoned to death for incest.” The case is all the more noteworthy for the fact that there was no proof that he was her son, the sentence being imposed after presuming that fact because“he clinged to her.”?* Simeon ben Shetah, who declined to impose the death penalty in one case involving overwhelming circumstantial evidence,” is said, nonetheless, to have hanged eighty women in Ashkelon, * and in 240 C.E., Origen declares in a letter that the Jewish patriarch in Palestine exercised the power to impose and carry out capital punishment.*!