Masechet Sanhedrin, Perek Zayin, Mishnah Bet. Mishnah is going to talk about the person who was executed by sereifah, burning. The Mishnah says, “This is the procedure for those people who got a sentence from the Sanhedrin that they were going to be killed through burning.” They would take the criminal, the person who was sentenced, and stand him in a pile of manure up to his knees in order to trap him and make sure that he didn't move. They were eventually going to pour hot lead down his throat, so they wanted to make sure that the lead didn't fall onto his skin. That would be more painful than necessary. The Beit Din (court) was very careful not to cause unnecessary pain. They would have him stuck there in this manure. They would take a very rough scarf, put it inside a soft scarf, and wrap it around this person's neck. Two people would stand on each side of him. One would pull to one side, and the other would pull to the other side, and they would choke him. Then he would open his mouth because of that pressure. The pulling of the scarf was so strong that it would cause him to open up his mouth. While that was happening, somebody had already lit a fire under a bar of lead. The lead would then melt. Once it was melted, they would pour it down the throat of the person who was sentenced to death. It would go into his stomach and burn his insides.
We see that this is the accomplishment of... We have a tradition that it entered their nose and burned them on the inside. So even though their outward bodies were not burned, the Torah still calls it burning a sereifah. You can see from here that we can accomplish what the Torah tells us about burning, even if we're only burning the inside of a person and leaving the outside intact. So since we can do it in that way, we have a commandment: Love your friend like you love yourself. That tells us that whenever we're doing a punishment, like an execution, even though we have to do it, we should do it with as little pain as possible. Likewise over here. Doing it in this fashion, which is a sereifah, which was a Torah once from the Beit Din, they could do it in a quicker and less painful way than burning the entire body.
The next Tanna (early rabbinic sage), though, is going to say that they did not squeeze the neck. Rabbi Yehuda says that if we did it in this way, as we just described above, using these scarves to choke him, and they choked him to the point where he died, they wouldn't have fulfilled the mitzvah, the commandment from the Torah, of killing through burning. So what do they do? Rabbi Yehuda says they don't pull the scarves. They don't pull the scarves. They force his mouth open with a metal tool like tongs. Then they light a fire under the bar of lead. That really happened earlier. Now the lead is melted, and they pour it down his throat. It goes down into his stomach and burns his inside. That's the opinion of Rabbi Yehuda. He says he wouldn't want to risk the choking here, because the choking could eventually put him to death in a different way. The Torah tells us that for this type of crime that the person did, as the Mishnah will get into at some point, we don't choke the guy; we burn him. That's why Rabbi Yehuda argues.
Rabbi Elazar ben Tzadok is now going to argue against the entire Mishnah about how burning was done. He doesn't think that lead was used. There was once a situation where a Kohen (priest)'s daughter committed adultery. A Kohen's daughter who commits adultery is obligated to be burned. The Beit Din took bundles of branches, wrapped them around her, and burned her by setting her on fire. So seemingly, the way to accomplish sereifah is by actually burning the person, not by having lead poured down their throat.
The Rabbis said back to Rabbi Elazar ben Tzadok: “The reason that the Beit Din did that is that they were not a knowledgeable Beit Din in the laws of the Torah. They were a court of Tzedukim, people who followed the literal understanding of the Torah and did not have a Torah Shebe'al Peh (the Torah's tradition), so they burned her whole body.” But the Tzedukim, of course, rejected the Torah's tradition, that we have Torah Shebe'al Peh, and therefore they didn't realize that the proper way was to burn with lead. That's what the Rabbis answered him. They told him that the correct way really is with lead being poured down the condemned person's throat, but this Beit Din did not follow the Halakha (Jewish law) correctly.