As a preliminary to the evaluation of the earliest stages of rabbinic legislation formulated in Mishnah Sanhedrin 7:1, it must be recalled that after the destruction by the Romans in 70 CE of Jerusalem and the consequent disappearance of the Judaean state institutions, Rome deprived Jewish law courts of capital jurisdiction. However, these courts quietly pretended that they still possessed it. Hence they continued to legislate and redefined stoning and burning. They even added two new forms of death penalties to those of the Bible: beheading and strangling. At the same time, the rabbis shied away from the idea of actually condemning a Jew to death and described as bloodthirsty the tribunal that imposed one capital sentence a year.

The rabbinic stoning process takes the condemned outside the town, to the edge of a slight elevation twice the height of a man, say 3.5 metres. One witness pushed the guilty person so that he/she fell down from the ridge. If the fall resulted in death, the "stoning" was completed. If not, the second witness dropped a large stone on the heart of the condemned. If this was still not enough, the whole community went on throwing stones until death ensued. Stoning was followed by the ritual hanging of the body on a tree or gibbet until the evening.

While the Bible takes the burning to death of a criminal in the literal sense on a pile of wood, Mishnah Sanhedrin 7:2 defines this mode of execution differently. The condemned was immobilised by being put into dung up to the knees. The two witnesses then started to strangle him/her, forcing the man or woman to gape and thus allow the insertion of a lethal burning "wick" into the mouth. According to the Talmud, this wick was in fact hot melted lead.

Beheading was a mode of execution reserved for the civil authority. The Bible never refers to decapitation, but we know that it was practised not only by Rome but also by Herodian rulers. King Herod Agrippa I (41-44 CE), for example, is reported to have ordered the execution with the sword of the apostle James, son of Zebedee.