Acts 7:59 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

And they stoned Stephen,— While they stoned Stephen, he prayed, and said, &c. Literally, They stoned Stephen, invoking and saying, &c. There is nothing for the word God in the original. A solemn prayer, like this to Christ, in which a departing soul is thus committed into his hands, is such an act of worship as no good man would have paid to a mere creature, Stephen here worshipping Christ in the very same manner in whichChrist worshipped the Father on the cross. This stoning seems to have been an act of popular fury, like the stoning of St. Paul at Lystra, ch. Acts 14:19 and exceeding the power which the Jews regularly had. The Jews were more than once ready to stone Christ, not only when by their own confession they had not power to put any one to death, but when nothing had passed which had the shadow of a legal trial. How far they might now have formed those express notions of what the rabbies called the judgment of zeal, is uncertain; but it is plain they acted on that principle, and as if they had thought every private Israelite had, like Phineas, who is pleaded as an example of it, a right to put another to deathon the spot, if he found him in a capital breach of the divine law; a notion directly contrary to Deuteronomy 17:6 which requires at least two witnesses in capital cases, where there is a legal process. The manner of their stoning persons was this: a crier went before him who was to die, proclaiming his name, his crime, and those who were witnesses against him. When they were come within two or three yards of the place of execution, they stripped the criminal naked, except a small covering, for decency, about his middle. The place of execution, from which they threw down the malefactor, was above twice the height of a man, upon which he was made to ascend with his hands bound. When he was ascended, the witnesses laid their hands upon him, and then stripped off their upper garments, that they might be fitter for going through the execution. From that high place one of the witnesses threw down the criminal, and dashed his loins against a great stone, which was laid there for that very purpose; if that killed him not, then the other witness threw from thesame height a great stone upon his heart, as he lay on his back, and was stunned with the fall. If that dispatched him not, then all the people fell on him with stones till he died.