Yes
For murder Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. Genesis 9:6 Whoso killeth any person, the murderer shall be put to death. Numbers 35.30 For disobedient children He that smiteth his father, or his mother, shall be surely put to death. Exodus 21:15 He that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death. Exodus 21:17 For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him. Leviticus 20:9 For witches Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Exodus 22:18 For beastiality (both the human and the beast) Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death. Exodus 22:19 And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast. Leviticus 20:15 And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman, and the beast: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:16 For worshipping another god He that sacrificeth unto any god save unto the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed. Exodus 22:20 For breaking the Sabbath Ye shall keep the sabbath therefore; for it is holy unto you: every one that defileth it shall surely be put to death. Ex.31:14 Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD: whosoever doeth any work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death. Exodus 31:15 Six days shall work bedone, but on the seventh day there shall be to you an holy day, a sabbath of rest to the LORD: whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death. Exodus 35:2 For adultery And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death. Leviticus 20:10 For incest And the man that lieth with his father's wife hath uncovered his father's nakedness: both of them shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:11 And if a man lie with his daughter in law, both of them shall surely be put to death: they have wrought confusion; their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:12 And if a man take a wife and her mother, it is wickedness: they shall be burnt with fire, both he and they; that there be no wickedness among you. Leviticus 20:14 For homosexuality If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:13 For blasphemy He that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him. Leviticus 24:16 For stealing slaves He that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death. Exodus 21:16 For not being a virgin on the night of the wedding If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her ... and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate.... But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you. Deuteronomy 22:13-22 For rape victims who don't cry out loudly enough If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her; Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour's wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you. Deuteronomy 22:23-24
Cited passages
Whoever sheds man’s blood, his blood will be shed by man, for God made man in his own image.
“ ‘Whoever kills any person, the murderer shall be slain based on the testimony of witnesses; but one witness shall not testify alone against any person so that he dies.
“Anyone who attacks his father or his mother shall be surely put to death.
“Anyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Usually considered reconciled
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Posed as a binary, the question has an unambiguous answer for the Pentateuch: the legal codes endorse capital punishment for a long and varied catalog of offenses. The death penalty in the Torah is not a single law but the convergence of three distinct legal strata that source criticism distinguishes — the Covenant Code (Exod 20:22-23:33, including the execution provisions of 21:12-17, 22:18-20), the Holiness Code (Lev 17-26, supplying the dense list of capital offenses in Lev 20, with its refrain "their blood is upon them"), and the Deuteronomic law (Deut 22 and elsewhere). These corpora developed over time and in different circles — the Priestly/Holiness material is widely dated to the exilic or post-exilic period, the Covenant Code to an earlier monarchic setting — yet all three independently prescribe death, by stoning, burning, or unspecified execution, for offenses ranging from murder to Sabbath violation, idolatry, adultery, incest, male homosexual intercourse, blasphemy, cursing a parent, and a young bride found not to be a virgin. The cumulative weight is overwhelming endorsement.
Genesis 4:15, where the LORD sets a protective mark on Cain "lest any who found him should kill him," is the lone counter-text, and it sits in a fundamentally different register. It is not a legal prescription but a narrative etiology set in primeval, pre-Sinai time. The harmonization advanced by Walton, Hamilton, Wenham, and Sailhamer reads it accordingly: God protects Cain from private blood-vengeance in an era before any juridical institution exists to try and execute a murderer. This is wholly consistent with the later framework, which in Genesis 9:6 — itself part of the primeval narrative — establishes lethal human authority over bloodshed ("whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed"). On this reading the mark forestalls vendetta, not institutional justice; it does not express divine disapproval of capital punishment but the absence, in Cain's day, of the lawful authority to administer it. This is a sound canonical reading and the database's "No" answer overreads Genesis 4:15: the verse simply does not assert that God disapproves of capital punishment. As an internal Pentateuchal matter, then, the tension largely dissolves, because the death-penalty laws and the protection of Cain operate in different registers and different epochs of the narrative world.
The sharper tension is canonical and cross-testamental, and the existing commentary rightly points to it. In John 8:7 Jesus suspends the Mosaic stoning penalty for adultery ("Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her"), a scene whose moral force runs directly against Lev 20:10 and Deut 22. But this passage cannot bear much weight: the pericope adulterae (John 7:53-8:11) is textually secondary. It is absent from the earliest and best witnesses — P66, P75, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Vaticanus — appears at varied locations in the manuscripts that do carry it (some after Luke 21:38), and is marked with obeli in others; the critical consensus (Metzger, Ehrman) is that it was not part of the original Gospel of John, even if the underlying tradition may be old. As evidence for a canonical contradiction it is therefore compromised, though the sympathy it expresses recurs more broadly in early Christian ethics.
Whether the question yields a "contradiction" thus depends on a methodological choice. Read as a single, harmonized ethical voice, the Bible both prescribes death for dozens of acts and, in the Cain episode and the later Jesus tradition, restrains lethal punishment — a tension. Read as a layered, historically developing legal tradition — the approach of Milgrom, Knohl, Greenberg, and the comparative ANE work collected by Westbrook — the Pentateuchal codes are straightforward, culturally typical endorsements of capital punishment, broadly paralleled in the Laws of Hammurabi and other Near Eastern collections, while Genesis 4:15 is a narrative provision and the Johannine scene a late accretion. Within the Pentateuch itself, the prescriptions vastly outweigh the single counter-text, and that counter-text does not say what the contradiction requires.
Where the critical reading lands: overstated within the Pentateuch — Genesis 4:15 is a pre-juridical narrative provision, not a divine repudiation of capital punishment; a real ethical tension exists only at the canonical level, and the strongest NT counter-text (John 8) is text-critically secondary.
Sources for this reading