Stoning
Based on Wikipedia: Stoning
The Weight of Stones
In the Gospel of John, Jesus kneels in the dust and writes something in the sand while an angry crowd demands he condemn a woman caught in adultery. The punishment they expect is clear: death by stoning. What happens next—"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"—has echoed through two thousand years of moral philosophy. But the practice the crowd was ready to carry out that day has an even longer history, one that reaches back to the earliest human civilizations and, remarkably, continues in parts of the world today.
Stoning, also called lapidation, is execution by communal rock-throwing. A group hurls stones at a bound or restrained person until blunt force trauma kills them. It is, by design, a slow and participatory death. Unlike hanging or beheading, which require a single executioner, stoning implicates an entire community in the killing. Everyone throws. Everyone shares the responsibility—and the guilt.
This wasn't an accident of primitive justice. It was the point.
Ancient Origins: Why Communities Killed Together
The earliest recorded stonings come from the ancient Near East—the region spanning modern-day Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. But the practice wasn't limited to this area. The Greek geographer Pausanias, writing in the second century of the Common Era, describes two rulers of the Greek city-state of Orchomenus being stoned to death around 700 BCE. The Romans used stoning as well, though they generally preferred more theatrical forms of execution.
In ancient Palestine, stoning appears to have been the standard method of capital punishment. The Hebrew Bible prescribes it for offenses including blasphemy (speaking irreverently about God), idolatry (worshipping other gods), and certain sexual transgressions. The execution was always conducted outside the city walls. This physical separation served a symbolic purpose: the offender was literally cast out of the community before being killed by it.
The communal nature of stoning served several functions in ancient societies. First, it distributed moral responsibility. No single person could be identified as "the executioner"—the blood was on everyone's hands equally. Second, it demonstrated social consensus. A stoning required many participants, which theoretically meant the community as a whole had judged and condemned the offender. Third, it served as a powerful deterrent. Watching your neighbors, friends, and family members pick up rocks and throw them at a screaming human being was meant to burn the consequences of transgression into every witness's memory.
The Hebrew word for this practice is "sekilah." But the Talmud—the central text of Rabbinic Jewish law, compiled between the third and sixth centuries—describes a more complex procedure than simple rock-throwing. According to Talmudic law, the condemned person was first thrown from a height roughly twice as tall as an average person. If this fall didn't kill them, a large stone was dropped onto their chest. Only if they survived both of these would bystanders begin throwing stones.
This procedural elaboration hints at something important: even in ancient times, religious authorities were uncomfortable with stoning and sought to regulate, limit, and sometimes prevent it.
The Jewish Tradition: Making Execution Nearly Impossible
Over centuries, Rabbinic Judaism developed an extraordinary web of procedural requirements around capital punishment. These rules were so stringent that they made execution practically impossible to carry out legally.
Consider what was required for a death sentence under Rabbinic law. First, a properly constituted court of at least twenty-three qualified judges had to hear the case. Second, at least two eyewitnesses had to testify—not just that they saw the crime, but that they had personally warned the accused beforehand that what they were about to do was criminal and would result in death. Third, the accused had to have acknowledged this warning and proceeded anyway. The crime had to be committed voluntarily, without coercion or assistance from others. The accused had to be of sound mind and legal age.
The practical effect was that legal executions became vanishingly rare. A court that executed one person in seven years was called "destructive." Some rabbis argued that a court executing one person in seventy years deserved that label. Others held that if they had been members of the ancient Sanhedrin—the supreme Jewish court—no one would ever have been executed.
This wasn't an oversight or a failure to enforce the law. It was the law working as intended. The rabbis believed that human justice was inherently fallible. Better to let the guilty go free than to risk executing the innocent. Capital punishment existed in theory as a statement about the gravity of certain offenses, but it was never supposed to be routine.
By late antiquity—roughly the fourth through seventh centuries—Jewish courts had largely abandoned capital punishment altogether. When medieval Jewish communities did have the power to execute criminals, they generally avoided stoning, and they didn't limit themselves to the offenses specified in scripture. The letter of the law had given way to something more flexible, and perhaps more merciful.
The Christian Encounter
The New Testament records several instances of stoning, which illuminate both the practice and the tensions around it in first-century Palestine.
The most famous is the story of Stephen, considered the first Christian martyr. According to the Book of Acts, Stephen was brought before the Sanhedrin on charges of blasphemy. After delivering a lengthy speech condemning his accusers, he was dragged outside the city and stoned to death. The account notes that the witnesses laid their cloaks at the feet of a young man named Saul—later known as the Apostle Paul, who would become Christianity's most influential early missionary.
Paul himself was nearly killed by stoning in the city of Lystra, in what is now Turkey. According to Acts, he was stoned and dragged outside the city, left for dead. He survived, and characteristically went right back to preaching.
The historian Josephus and the church father Eusebius both record that James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church, was thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple and then stoned, shortly before Jerusalem's destruction by Rome in 70 CE.
Historians debate whether these stonings were legal executions or extrajudicial mob violence. Rome generally reserved the right to impose capital punishment in its provinces, which would have made Jewish executions technically illegal. But Rome may have granted Jewish authorities limited permission to execute people for religious offenses, particularly within the Temple precincts. Or these may have been spontaneous lynchings that the Roman authorities chose not to punish.
The distinction mattered enormously to the people involved. It matters less to us, except as a reminder that the line between "execution" and "murder by mob" has always been blurry when communities decide to kill together.
Islamic Law: The Hadith Problem
Here is a fact that surprises many people: the Quran, the central religious text of Islam, does not mention stoning as a punishment for any crime.
The Quran does prescribe punishment for "zina"—a term that encompasses various forms of illicit sexual intercourse, including adultery and fornication. But the punishment specified is flogging, not death. So where does stoning come from in Islamic law?
The answer lies in the hadith—the collected sayings and actions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. These texts, compiled in the centuries after Muhammad's death, became a secondary source of Islamic law alongside the Quran. Several hadith describe Muhammad ordering or approving stonings for adultery, and classical Islamic jurisprudence accepted these as establishing stoning as the proper punishment for married persons who committed zina.
This created a theological puzzle that Islamic scholars have wrestled with for over a millennium. If stoning is truly God's law, why isn't it in the Quran? Various explanations have been proposed. Some scholars claimed there was once a "verse of stoning" in the Quran that was somehow lost or abrogated. Others argued that the hadith could supplement the Quran with additional divine commands. Still others held that Muhammad's actions represented a special form of revelation distinct from the Quranic text.
Whatever the theological resolution, the practical reality was that classical Islamic law came to prescribe stoning for adultery—specifically, for adultery committed by a "muhsan," a person who has been validly married and has consummated that marriage.
But like the Jewish rabbis before them, classical Muslim jurists surrounded this punishment with procedural requirements that made it almost impossible to implement. To prove zina worthy of the stoning penalty, four adult male witnesses of good character had to testify that they personally witnessed the act of penetration. Not merely that they saw two people in a compromising position—that they saw the actual sexual act with their own eyes. The witnesses had to agree on all details of time, place, and circumstances. If even one witness's testimony was inconsistent, all four could be flogged for false accusation.
Alternatively, a person could confess to zina, but the confession had to be repeated four times, and the confessor could withdraw it at any point up to and including during the execution itself. Some scholars held that judges should actively encourage withdrawal of confessions.
The result was that, in the words of one historian, only "a few rare and isolated" instances of legal stoning for zina can be documented in the entire pre-modern history of the Islamic world. The law existed. It was rarely enforced.
The Modern Revival
For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stoning was essentially a dead letter. Colonial powers imposed European-style legal codes across much of the Muslim world, and even after independence, most Muslim-majority countries retained secular criminal law systems. Adultery might be illegal, but it was punished with fines or imprisonment, not death.
This changed with the Islamic revival of the late twentieth century.
The movement had complex roots. Secular authoritarian regimes had promised development and prosperity; many delivered neither. Western cultural influence—movies, music, fashion, values—felt to many Muslims like a form of colonialism by other means. Religious conservatives argued that abandoning Islamic law had been the source of their societies' problems. A return to sharia, they believed, would restore justice, morality, and divine blessing.
Stoning became one of the most symbolically charged elements of this revival. Not because Islamist movements were primarily focused on sexual morality—they had broader political and economic agendas—but because hudud punishments (the category of penalties specified in religious texts, including stoning for adultery, amputation for theft, and flogging for false accusation) represented the clearest possible break from Western legal norms. Implementing hudud said: we reject your system. We follow God's law.
Starting in the late 1970s, several countries incorporated hudud punishments into their criminal codes. Iran did so after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Pakistan followed under General Zia ul-Haq. Sudan enacted hudud laws in 1983. Several northern Nigerian states adopted Islamic criminal codes after Nigeria's return to democracy in 1999.
But here's the complicated part: implementation has been wildly inconsistent.
In most of these countries, the supreme courts have been reluctant to uphold stoning sentences. Pakistan's Federal Shariat Court and Supreme Court have never confirmed a stoning verdict. Nigeria's higher courts have overturned every stoning sentence on appeal. Sudan's and Iran's supreme courts have approved such verdicts only rarely. Many stoning sentences are quietly commuted to lesser punishments, allowed to lapse, or reversed on technical grounds.
The gap between law-on-the-books and law-in-practice suggests that even in countries that have embraced hudud rhetoric, there's deep ambivalence about actually carrying out these punishments. The symbolic value of having stoning in the legal code may be more important than using it.
Where Stoning Happens Today
Despite this ambivalence, stonings do still occur. Understanding where and how requires distinguishing between several different situations.
Iran is the country with the most documented cases of judicial stoning in recent decades. Iranian law includes detailed provisions for how stonings are to be conducted: men are buried up to the waist, women up to the chest. The stones must be large enough to cause injury but not so large as to kill with one or two throws. The 2008 penal code specified that if a person sentenced to stoning escaped from the pit, they could go free if the conviction was based on their own confession—but would be returned and re-buried if it was based on witness testimony.
Iran officially placed a moratorium on stoning in 2002 after international pressure. But documented stonings have continued. In 2009, two people were stoned to death in the city of Mashhad for adultery. Human rights organizations have documented additional cases. Iranian officials have sometimes claimed that stonings carried out since 2002 were "extrajudicial"—meaning the government didn't authorize them. This raises its own troubling questions about the rule of law.
The most internationally publicized Iranian stoning case was that of Soraya Manutchehri in 1986, whose story was told in a book and later a film. She was convicted of adultery on testimony that was likely fabricated by her husband, who wanted to divorce her without paying the settlement she was owed.
Afghanistan represents a different pattern. Under the Taliban's first period of rule (1996-2001) and again since their return to power in 2021, stoning has been an official punishment. But Afghanistan has rarely had a functioning centralized legal system. Much of what happens there—including stonings—occurs in areas controlled by warlords, tribal leaders, or local Taliban commanders, often without anything resembling due process. In 2023, the Taliban publicly reaffirmed their commitment to stoning, with particular emphasis on punishing women for adultery. Reports of extrajudicial stonings by Taliban forces and affiliated groups continue.
Saudi Arabia presents yet another variation. Unlike Iran and Pakistan, Saudi Arabia never adopted a formal criminal code. Saudi judges apply traditional Hanbali jurisprudence—one of the four major schools of Sunni Islamic law—and have broad discretionary power. Interestingly, despite this traditional framework, documented stonings in Saudi Arabia are extremely rare. Most Saudi death sentences are carried out by beheading and are based on the judge's discretionary authority rather than hudud provisions. The classical principle that hudud penalties should be avoided when possible appears to carry weight in Saudi practice, even when Saudi rhetoric doesn't acknowledge it.
Northern Nigeria adopted sharia criminal codes in twelve states starting in 2000. Multiple people have been sentenced to death by stoning, generating international headlines—particularly the 2002 case of Amina Lawal, a woman sentenced for having a child outside marriage. But Nigeria's higher courts have overturned every stoning sentence. The formal legal system has never carried out a stoning. However, extrajudicial stonings by mobs and militant groups do occur.
Pakistan has hudud laws on the books but, like Nigeria, has never carried out a judicial stoning. Pakistan's Supreme Court has consistently found procedural flaws in stoning convictions. However, tribal areas in Pakistan's northwest, which operate partially outside the formal legal system, have seen extrajudicial stonings carried out by local councils.
Brunei in 2019 implemented a sharia penal code that technically includes stoning for adultery and several other offenses. The Sultan immediately declared that Brunei's existing moratorium on capital punishment would apply to these laws. Brunei has not executed anyone since 1957. The law appears to be purely symbolic.
Beyond the State: Vigilante Justice
Official legal systems are only part of the picture. Stonings also occur outside any legal framework—carried out by families, tribes, mobs, and militant groups.
In 2007, a seventeen-year-old Yazidi girl named Du'a Khalil Aswad was stoned to death by members of her own community in northern Iraq. The Yazidis are a religious minority whose faith incorporates elements of ancient Mesopotamian religions, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam. Reports about Du'a's "crime" varied: some said she had converted to Islam, others that she had been seen with a Muslim boy. Video of the killing was posted online and triggered retaliatory attacks against Yazidis by Islamic militants.
In 2012, at least fourteen young people in Baghdad were reportedly stoned to death by Shia militants for wearing "emo" fashion—skinny jeans, band t-shirts, styled hair. The perpetrators apparently believed these Western-influenced styles indicated homosexuality or devil worship. Shia religious scholars condemned the killings.
When the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) controlled territory in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2019, it carried out stonings under its own interpretation of sharia. Videos of these executions were part of ISIS's propaganda campaign.
These extrajudicial killings differ from judicial stonings in important ways. There is no court, no formal procedure, no possibility of appeal. They are lynchings carried out in the name of religion or tradition. But they draw on the same ancient symbolism: the community, acting together, purges itself of contamination.
The Meaning of Communal Killing
Why have human societies, across cultures and centuries, made execution a group activity?
One answer is that communal killing binds the killers together. When everyone participates, no one can claim innocence. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that punishment serves primarily to reinforce social solidarity—to remind the community of its shared values by dramatically demonstrating what happens to those who violate them. Stoning is the purest expression of this idea: the community literally surrounds the transgressor and destroys them together.
Another answer is that communal killing diffuses individual guilt. The twentieth-century political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about how bureaucracy enables atrocity by dividing responsibility into such small pieces that no one feels personally accountable. Stoning operates on a similar principle at the moment of killing itself. Which stone was the fatal one? No one knows. No one has to know.
A third answer is that communal killing forces witnesses to commit. You cannot watch a stoning from a position of moral neutrality. Either you pick up a stone, or you are implicitly siding with the victim against the community. The pressure to participate is the pressure to demonstrate loyalty.
The Gospel of John tells us that when Jesus challenged the crowd to let the sinless one throw the first stone, they dropped their rocks and walked away, "beginning with the eldest." The oldest, presumably, had the most sins to account for—but also, perhaps, the most accumulated wisdom about what it meant to participate in such a killing.
The Human Rights Perspective
Every major international human rights organization condemns stoning as torture, cruel and unusual punishment, and a violation of the right to life and physical integrity. The United Nations has called for a universal ban on the practice.
From a human rights perspective, several features of stoning are particularly troubling. The method causes prolonged suffering—death can take anywhere from minutes to over an hour. The punishment is grossly disproportionate to the offense, especially when applied to consensual sexual activity between adults. The procedural safeguards that theoretically protect the accused are often absent in practice. Women are disproportionately sentenced to stoning, partly because pregnancy provides automatic evidence of sexual activity while men's paternity can be denied. And in many documented cases, the "adultery" that triggered the sentence was actually rape—but the victim couldn't prove lack of consent.
Defenders of stoning argue that human rights organizations are imposing Western values on societies with different traditions. They point to the procedural requirements that, in theory, make wrongful convictions nearly impossible. They argue that the harshness of the punishment deters the crime. And they maintain that divine law cannot be overridden by human moral intuitions.
The counterargument is that human rights are universal precisely because they derive from human dignity rather than cultural tradition—and that protecting people from being killed by having rocks thrown at them until they die is about as fundamental as rights get.
The Persistence of an Ancient Practice
Stoning has existed for at least three thousand years. It has been prescribed, regulated, hedged with procedural safeguards designed to prevent its use, and then, in the past fifty years, revived as a symbol of religious authenticity and rejection of Western modernity.
The pattern of revival is striking. Laws mandating stoning are passed. International pressure mounts. Higher courts find ways to avoid enforcing the laws. Sentences are commuted, overturned, or simply never carried out. And yet the laws stay on the books, because they serve a symbolic function separate from their practical application.
Meanwhile, outside the formal legal system, mobs and militants continue to stone people to death—invoking the same ancient traditions, but without any of the procedural constraints that religious scholars developed precisely to prevent such killings.
The story of stoning is, in one sense, a story about the gap between law and practice. Religious authorities have repeatedly found ways to make execution-by-stoning nearly impossible to carry out while preserving it as a theoretical punishment. Modern Islamist movements revived these punishments in law but have often been unable or unwilling to implement them in practice. The law says one thing; the courts do another.
But it is also a story about the persistence of communal violence. Whatever restraints legal systems impose, there remains an impulse in human communities to gather together and destroy perceived threats—to pick up stones and throw them, as people have done for millennia.
When Jesus told the crowd that the sinless one should throw the first stone, he was not merely making a point about hypocrisy. He was interrupting the ritual of communal killing by forcing each individual to consider their own participation. The crowd dispersed because no one was willing to throw the first stone alone.
The lesson may be that stoning requires collective self-deception: the belief that throwing one stone among hundreds makes you less responsible than throwing a stone by yourself. The ritual distributes guilt. But guilt, as Jesus seems to have understood, is not actually divisible. Each person who throws is fully responsible. Each stone matters.
That recognition—that participation in communal violence does not diminish individual moral responsibility—may be the most important weapon against a practice that has survived for three thousand years by persuading people otherwise.
--- The essay is complete. It transforms the encyclopedic Wikipedia content into a narrative essay that opens with the compelling Gospel story hook (directly connecting to the Sarah Bessey article), explores the historical and theological complexity of stoning across Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, and concludes with philosophical reflections on communal violence and individual responsibility. The writing varies sentence and paragraph length for good audio rhythm with Speechify.