Hanging, as a mode of public execution of criminals, must be regarded as to a great extent an Anglo-Saxon mode of execution ; and although occasionally practised by the nations of antiquity, it seems among them to have been used chiefly by suicides, or in cases in which especial ignominy was intended to be attached to the criminal.
Among the Hebrews, the national punishment was unquestionably that of stoning to death by stones thrown with the hand ; and it is clear, from many passages in the Old Testament, that the hanging so often spoken of was the exposure of the body of the criminal, after death, to the birds of the air and to the beasts of the field, either by suspension from a tree, or by crucifixion on a gallows.
In Deut. xxi. 22, 23, it is provided that the criminal already executed shall be lifted up on a tree, and that his body shall be taken down before nightfall ; it is also proved, by the story of the Hebrew thief in Herodotus, that the Jews, even before they left Egypt, had a special horror of the exposure of the dend at night to the birds of prey ; for he relates that the King of Egypt exposed on a cross the headless body of the thief caught in the trap laid in the treasure-house, in the hope that his relations might be induced to attempt the removal of the body before nightfall.
From Gen. xl. 19, we may infer that the Egyptian practice was to execute the criminal by decapitation, and afterwards expose the body nailed on a cross to the birds of prey.
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