The Great Court of Seventy One

The Mishnah's tractate Sanhedrin describes a great court of seventy one members sitting in Jerusalem with authority over the most serious matters, capital cases and questions too significant for lesser courts, alongside a network of lesser Sanhedrins of twenty three members seated in individual towns to handle more routine judicial business. The great Sanhedrin is described as meeting in the Chamber of Hewn Stone on the Temple Mount and, distinctively, as sitting in a semicircle rather than in a row facing a single presiding figure, a seating arrangement the Mishnah explains as allowing every member to see every other member during deliberation, which mattered because votes and arguments were conducted collectively rather than delegated to a single judge.

The body was headed by a Nasi, a president or patriarch, with a deputy known as the Av Beit Din, and its procedures for examining witnesses in capital cases, described at length in the same tractate, are notably weighted toward caution, requiring extensive cross examination and treating an execution carried out even once in seventy years as evidence of an unacceptably harsh court. Much of what is known about the Sanhedrin's internal procedure comes from this rabbinic legal literature, composed after the Temple's destruction and describing an institution its authors could no longer observe directly.