The first category comprises transgressions against God and the Jewish religion: idolatry, blasphemy, sorcery and the breaking of the Sabbath. Idolatry in its various forms entails the worshipping of deities other than the God of Israel, or the attempt by false prophets or even by members of one's family to induce Jews to embrace the cult of other gods. Blasphemy amounts to cursing or reviling the name of God by an Israelite or even an alien. Sorcery, enacted by male or female practitioners, consists of prohibited rites with a view to obtaining forbidden effects, such as recalling the spirit of the dead from the underworld. Finally, the breaking of the Sabbath is achieved by the performance of acts qualified as work. 

The second class of capital sentences punishes offences committed against human beings. To these belong premeditated murder legislated on in Exodus, Leviticus and in greater detail Numbers, and the kidnapping of a free Israelite with the intention to turn him into a slave. The death sentence also awaited the youth who gravely misbehaved towards his parents, one who hit or cursed his father or mother or constantly disobeyed them, and thus became what the Bible calls a "stubborn and rebellious son". 

The last category includes various sexual transgressions: the death penalty was pronounced on both parties found guilty of adultery. The same fate was decreed for the man guilty of incest with his stepmother, his daughter-in-law or his sister, whether the daughter of his father or his mother, and for someone who had married both a girl and her mother; for a priest's daughter who had become a whore; for people, either male or female, who had committed bestiality, that is, sexual contact with an animal. Death was to be inflicted on both humans and beasts. Finally — dare I formulate this in this age of homosexual rehabilitation? — anyone committing a male homosexual act was to be executed. The Hebrew Bible (and St Paul) considered gay sex an abomination, although curiously lesbianism is nowhere legislated against in Scripture. 

Only two forms of capital punishment are specified in the Bible-stoning and burning. Stoning was the most common mode of execution. It was administered by the whole community, with the two prosecution witnesses starting the stone-throwing. It was laid down as the punishment for idolatry, blasphemy, the profanation of the Sabbath, the crime of being a "stubborn and rebellious son", the non-disclosure by a bride that she was no longer a virgin, and sexual intercourse forced on an engaged virgin by a man in town. The reference to the town as opposed to the countryside implies that if the woman had cried out for help someone might have come to her rescue.