To rest at last in the ground, to be buried in the sepulchre of their fathers, was accounted by the Jews as the greatest honour and happiness, and throughout the Old Testament the expression for death is sleeping, implying lying tranquil and undisturbed. Thus David, Azariah, and Jotham “slept with their fathers, and were buried in the city of David”—“for so He giveth His beloved sleep.”[1]

On the other hand, to die an unnatural or violent death, to be cast out of the grave like an abominable branch, to be as a carcass exposed in the sight of the sun, or trodden under foot, and not to be joined with their fathers in burial, was ever esteemed a note of infamy, and a kind of curse. “And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree: his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day (for he that is hanged is accursed of God); that thy land be not defiled.”[2] So Jehoiakim was threatened with the want of even ordinary burial, and to be cast out like carrion into some remote and sordid place. It was a severe sentence, “He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.”[3]

Again, Jeremiah foretelling the desolation of the Jews, “Their carcasses will I give to be meat for the fowls of the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth,”[4] “and no man shall fray them away;”[5] and in another place we are told that their bones shall be “spread before the sun, and the moon, and all the host of heaven, ... they shall not be gathered, nor be buried.”[6]

In the denunciation of Jehoiakim, in that picturesque and striking scene, when the king burnt the roll of Baruch, it is recorded against him: “His dead body shall be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost.”[7] So great, indeed, was the dread among the ancient Jews that the dead body should be treated with derision or contumely, that the Preacher expressed and summed up the general sentiment in these words: “If a man ... have no burial, I say that an untimely birth is better than he.”[8]

As with the Jews so it was with the Egyptians. They refused burial to executed criminals and gave their bodies to the birds and beasts. For instance, Joseph said to the chief baker, “Yet within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thine head from off thee, and shall hang thee on a tree; and the birds shall eat thy flesh from off thee.”[9] And so it came to pass.

We may gather, again, from the short and touching story of the long watches of Rizpah, how deep was the solicitude that the dead should not be polluted by birds and beasts,[10] or from the ghastly fate of Amasa, whose mangled corpse was covered with a cloth by a mere bystander—one of Joab’s men[11]—in order that the people might not be shocked by looking upon it—how strong was the feeling in those days against the wanton exposure of the divine image.

It would be easy to multiply examples from these sources, but with further regard to the seven sons of Saul it may be mentioned that “the victims were not, as the Authorized Version implies, hung, they were crucified. The seven crosses were planted in the rock on the top of the sacred hill of Gibeah.... The victims were sacrificed at the beginning of barley harvest,—the sacred and festal time of the Passover—and in the full blaze of the summer sun they hung till the fall of the periodical rain in October.... She spread on the rocky floor the thick mourning garment of black sackcloth, which as a widow she wore, and crouching there she watched that neither vulture nor jackal should molest the bodies.”[12] Thus the practice of gibbeting on a cross was in use at least as early as in the days of King David.

The misery of having no burial, of rendering neither justice to the earth nor mercy to the dead, was recognized by the refined nature of the Greeks, and, while they refused decent sepulture to infamous persons and prisoners, they yearned both in peace and war for quiet burial in the ground, for they were dismayed at the thought of burial at sea.[13]

Thus Mezentius, in the Æneid of Virgil, asks not Æneas to spare his life,

And Turnus—

And, to take another and a notable example, Hector, in his last hour, beseeched Achilles to take the ransom and suffer not his body to be devoured by the dogs of the Greeks, but to let the sons and daughters of Troy give him burial rites.[16]

It is said that a certain AchÆus, who disputed sovereign power with Antiochus, was betrayed by a Cretan, his limbs cut off, and his body wrapped in the skin of an ass, and exposed on a gibbet.

Pliny, in his “Natural History,”[17] tells us that Tarquinius Priscus, who died 578 B.C., ordered the dead bodies of suicides to be exposed on a cross. He was a powerful ruler, and an Etruscan, and made his mark on Rome. He came from Etruria when it was in a high state of development, and, no doubt, the practice of gibbeting on a cross was early in use with that ancient and gifted race.

The Romans dreaded the public exposure of their bodies, and shipwreck, no less than did the Greeks; thus Ovid—

They refused sepulture to suicides, for they thought it unreasonable that any hands should bury him whose own had destroyed himself, and they withheld decent burial from criminals.

Albertus Leoninus, from the Low Countries, one of the ablest lawyers of the sixteenth century, says, speaking of the Romans, “If any one killed himself his body was cast out upon a dunghill to have common sepulture with dogs, &c.; but, however, it was more customary to have his goods confiscated, and his body hung on the furca, or gibbet. All such persons as hung upon this gibbet were, by the laws, denied sepulture; and a sentry, says Petronius, was set to watch them, lest anybody should come by night and steal them away.”[19] The memorable words, “and sitting down they watched Him there,” cannot fail to occur to the mind.

Our Saviour, with all reverence be it said, was gibbeted—“nail’d, for our advantage, on the bitter cross,”[20] and it was not until long after that great Sacrifice—perhaps not until the fifth century—that the cross became the generally recognized Christian sign, and gradually took the place of the Chi Rho ? emblem.

The number of Saints who suffered, and were exposed upon the cross or gibbet, is larger than that of those who died the death in any other way. Saint Ferreolus, martyred in 212, is shown in “Die Iconographie der Heiligen” with a gibbet proper near him; Saint Anastatius, martyred in 628, is represented in a fresco in the church of SS. Vincent and Anastatius, in Rome, upon a gibbet, and pierced with many arrows; and the martyr Saint Colman, who suffered in the year 1012, is shown in “Das Passional” of 1480 hanging on a gibbet; in “Die Attribute der Heiligen” he stands in the sclavine of a pilgrim, with a rope in his hand, indicating the manner of his death.[21]