The "Cultural Context" Excuse

[Pat Mustard]

Regarding the OP, there's one crucial point both sides of the debate tend to neglect: while, in the Old Testament days, an alarming number of offenses were indeed considered punishable by death, death penalty cases then were on such stringent standards that anyone being executed was an extremely rare occurrence.

One crucial part involved witnesses. There needed to be witnesses to the crime in order for execution to happen. But not just any witnesses would do. They needed to fulfill these criteria:

• They both had to be male, employed, familiar with the law, and law-abiding.
  
• Before the crime was committed, they both had to inform the defendant clearly and succinctly that, if they did whatever they were on trial for, they would risk the death penalty, and had to be told something along the lines of "what I'm doing is a capital offense, I know it's a capital offense, but I'm gonna do it anyway." This had to be done within seconds of the act in question being committed.
  
• Neither of them could be related to each other or the accused.
  

Note, I'm sure if I were to write a story about such a scenario, it would threaten willing suspension of disbelief, but then there's the trial:

• A jury of at least 23 judges had to cross-examine both of the witnesses, and if any of the evidence one person gave contradicted the other, even on something as minor as someone's eye color, it was thrown out.
  
• A majority of at least 13/23 had to be in favor of conviction, but, if they have a unanimous verdict in favor of execution, well, let's just let this quote from the Talmud explain it: "If the Sanhedrin unanimously find [the accused] guilty, he is acquitted. Why? — Because we have learned by tradition that sentence must be postponed till the morrow in hope of finding new points in favour of the defence"
  

In the end, if a court executed two people over a span of 70 years, people were more likely to consider something wrong with the court than anything else.

More information can be found in the Talmud, specifically the Sanhedrin Tractate. This can be extremely difficult going, but it's probably worth it.

Also, for an illustration of this in action, see the story of Susannah and the Elders in Daniel (Chapter 13, Apocrypha).

Of course, when you hear even of Christians who talk about Homosexuality should be punishable by death in accordance with Levitical law, do you really expect them to actually go through this system?

Actually, the stuff you speak of has no basis in the jewish holy books. The strictures put in place by jewish scholars were as a result of the law being so draconian and nonsensical that people were being killed for miniscule infractions or under deliberately false pretences, and likely was causing severe disruption to jewish society. The stricuters were put in place to ameliorate the worst excesses of the tou shalt nots put into the mouth of yhwh by the scholars' ancestors.

You can see the exact same process play out again with the hadiths and fatwas which make up sharia law in islam. Both sets of rulings modify earlier rules, often ascribed as the inerrant word of god, to fit better into the society and culture the religion exists in.