The ironies of criminal execution were my interest in Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures, my 2006 study of the early rabbinic laws of capital punishment. One chapter deals with the apologetics of past scholarship on the subject, another with the Mishnah’s ritual of execution, a third and fourth with the key players in that ritual, the next with how the Rabbis subvert Roman forms of punishment, and a final chapter with how the Rabbis’ representation of execution compares with that in early Christian martyrdom narratives. My concern throughout was the criss-crossing between criminal execution and other cultural currents such as can be found in Nebraska’s recent execution, where one of the most pressing crises facing the country – the opioid epidemic – meets one of its most contentious moral questions, capital punishment.
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