This chapter notes how ancient societies used capital punishment, highlighting methods of execution and various legal codes (e.g., Draco's Code and the Code of Hammurabi) authorizing executions. The chapter discusses the "divine right of kings," corporal punishments used in prior centuries, and the lex talionis doctrine. It also highlights how punishment practices were tied to religious and societial beliefs, including interpretation of religious texts. The chapter traces the change in the law from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment, taking note of how judicial torture--a practice associated with contintental European civil law systems--was outlawed in certain locales in the eighteenth century even as harsh systems of punishment (e.g., the English "Bloody Code") persisted. The chapter also describes the Enlightenment thinkers--John Bellers, George Fox, William Penn, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Frederick II, Cesare Beccaria, and William Blackstone--who critiqued torture and capital punishment or called for the death penalty's abolition or curtailment. The chapter describes the death penalty's abolition in Tuscany (1786) and Austria (1787) and how the Enlightenment shaped the law.

Chapter 8 examines divine responses to violence, and in particular, to bloodshed and the outcry of the victim. The restoration, or ‘redemption’, of blood by a divine גאל הדם (‘restorer of blood’) is one of the primary ways that biblical texts portray Yhwh’s response to bloodshed. Through a study of select texts, including several from 1–2 Samuel, the following claims are made. First, Yhwh acted as restorer of blood and legal adjudicator for those wrongly accused. He played the role of Mesopotamian kings who addressed cases for claimants and accused. If the human system failed, the poor had legal recourse. Second, because of the frequent emphasis on the cries of the afflicted and poor in ancient Israelite literature, some poetic and narrative traditions came to valorize the renunciation of one’s legal rights to (human) vengeance. Devotion and loyalty to Yhwh were characterized in terms of committing one’s case to Yhwh, not only when the legal system failed, but in recognition of Yhwh’s unique prerogative to intervene.