Ver. 22, 23. He be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree— Or, He be put to death, &c. Calmet and Waterland. Hence it appears, that this punishment was not the same with the Roman crucifixion; for they hanged men alive upon the gibbet, and there let them expire; but this was only hanging up their dead bodies, (see 2 Samuel 4:12.) and exposing them to shame for a time; a day at the longest; for they were to be buried at night: His body shall not remain all night upon the tree. See Joshua 8:29; Joshua 10:26-27. He was to be buried, that the land might not be defiled; i.e. not by a natural, but a legal pollution, under which the whole country lay, as long as the body of a condemned malefactor hung exposed on the tree. For he that is hanged, is accursed of God, says the sacred writer; i.e. a dead body hanging upon a cross or tree, is a most impure thing, legally most abominable and execrable before God; and still more so, as this hanging up of the body was generally a token that the person had committed some horrid crime, whereby he had incurred the high displeasure of Almighty God. In this view of things, how unfathomably deep was the humiliation of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ! of whom the great apostle writes, that he hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us; for it is written, cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree. What service or adoration can ever be sufficient for us to testify our gratitude and love for so stupendous an act of humiliation! But we shall say more, when we come to Galatians 3:13.
He that is hanged is accursed of God— The celebrated Mr. de Beausobre, in his Crit. Hist. of Manich. tom. 1: p. 279, observes, that the sense of this passage is, that God hates wickedness, and that the body of a criminal, though dead, ought to be removed from his sight, as an object of horror. This is figurative. Men, when they detest any thing, order it to be removed from their sight. Moses never thought that a holy and innocent person, voluntarily sacrificing himself for the glory of God, could be an object of divine malediction, because he was hanged upon a tree.