In the episode of idolatry committed by a large group of Israelites, seduced by Moabite women in Numbers 25, Moses himself issued the following capital sentence for the guilty leaders: "Take all the chiefs of the people and put them to death." Here the Palestinian Targums as well as the early rabbinic commentary Sifre unhesitatingly interpret Numbers 25:4 with the help of the Hebrew/ Aramaic verbs tsalab and tselab, words that by the early period of the Christian era definitely meant "to crucify". If so, in their eyes crucifixion was a death penalty ordered by God and implemented by Moses, as the divine Law rewritten in the Temple Scroll later restated. Also in the Second Book of Samuel, King David hands over for execution the seven sons of his predecessor Saul. Once again the Aramaic Targum assumes that they were crucified (tselab). In short, the hypothesis is confirmed that in the late Second Temple period, during the Maccabaean-Hasmonaean rule (c. 160-60 BCE), death penalty by crucifixion was part of Jewish penal legislation. 

I believe that many of my general statements about the employment of the Greek and Aramaic terms by Josephus and the Targums as strictly applicable to crucifixion would be strongly contested by the Swedish scholar Gunnar Samuelsson, author of a very learned, not to say pedantic, recent doctoral dissertation on the subject published in 2011. Crucifixion in Late Antiquity: An Inquiry into the Background and Significance of the New Testament Terminology of Crucifixion presents a full survey of the entire Greek, Latin and Hebrew, biblical and early Jewish literature, from Homer (c. 8th century BCE) to Josephus and the New Testament (c. 100 CE).

Yet his conclusion, to me rather unsatisfactory, questions whether any of the descriptions, even the Gospel records of the execution of Jesus, contain a reliable definition of what crucifixion really was. A journalist's reading of Samuelsson's thesis led to the weird headline in the Daily Telegraph that it was not on the cross that Jesus died. 

The trouble with the method of Samuelsson and of similar sceptics is that, like the typical 19th-century German academic, they sit at their desks and absorb the smallest details discoverable in books, but have no time or inclination to face up to reality. Josephus and the early Targumists knew what crucifixion was from eyewitness experience. During the Roman siege of Jerusalem, Josephus used to walk among crosses and one day he even obtained the release of three of his friends from the gibbet. For two of them it was too late, despite the efforts of the physicians, but the third survived. So when he speaks of crucifixion, he means what he says, though he may use the first-century CE notion anachronistically about the "crucifixion" of Pharaoh's head baker.