Deuteronomy 21:22

f. Of the Exposed Corpse of a Criminal

A corpse exposed after execution shall be buried before night; cursed of God it must not be left to defile the land. In the Sg. address and closing with a deuteronomic formula.

Hanging (or impalement? see below) was not the form of the criminal's death but was subsequent to the execution and an aggravation of its dishonour. This is clear not only from Deuteronomy 21:22, but from Joshua 8:29; Joshua 10:26; 1 Samuel 31:10; 2 Samuel 4:12 and is perhaps intended also in Genesis 40:19 (and by consequence in Deuteronomy 21:22; Genesis 41:13). Compare the similar treatment of the corpses of traitors and other notorious criminals in Europe till within recent times. In early Israel bodies thus exposed were buried before night and under or behind great stones, as though finally to suppress and get rid of the spirit of the criminal, which otherwise would continue to haunt the neighbourhood. If that was the original idea, it is ignored by D and this other substituted, that the hanged thing was under God's curse and unburied might infect His holy land with His wrath.

22. if a man, etc.] Cp. Deuteronomy 21:15; Deuteronomy 21:18; lit. if there be against a man a sin, a sentence(mishpaṭ), of death. This compound phrase seems a fusion of a sin of death, a capital sin, Deuteronomy 22:26, and a sentence of death, a capital charge, Deuteronomy 19:6. Or mishpaṭis a gloss.

and thou hang him on a tree Not necessarily treebut something wooden(see Deuteronomy 19:5), LXX ἐπὶ ξύλου. It may have been a stake or pole, Esther 7:9, EVV. gallows. Of the cross in Galatians 3:13. So also hang, LXX κρεμάσητε, may be both here and in passages cited above affixor impale, Esther 7:9, LXX σταμροῦν (but this was in Persia, for which cp. the ἀνασκολοπίζειν of Herod. i. 128). Impalement is implied in Ezra 6:11; and probably in 2Ma 15:35, Jdt 14:1, Lamentations 5:12. As their sculptures illustrate, Assyrians and Babylonians frequently impaled the bodies of their enemies.