Matthew 27:26 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

When he had scourged Jesus. — The word used by St. Matthew, derived from the Latin flagellum, shows that it was the Roman punishment with knotted thongs of leather (like the Russian “knout” or the English “cat”), not the Jewish beating with rods (2 Corinthians 11:24-25). The pictures of the Stations, so widely used throughout Latin Christendom, have made other nations more familiar with the nature of the punishment than most Englishmen are. The prisoner was stripped sometimes entirely, sometimes to the waist, and tied by the hands to a pillar, with his back bent, so as to receive the full force of the blows. The scourge was of stout leather weighted with lead or bones. Jewish law limited its penalty to forty stripes, reduced in practice to “forty stripes save one” (2 Corinthians 11:24; Deuteronomy 25:3), but Roman practice knew no limit but that of the cruelty of the executioner or the physical endurance of the sufferer.