Exodus 22:18, 'Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live,' commands the killing of witches — a text with a direct, documented body count through the medieval and early-modern European and American witch trials.

Two distinct questions have to be separated: what the Hebrew statute originally addressed, and what later readers did with the KJV's English rendering. Lexically, mekhashepha (the feminine participle of kashaph, 'to practice sorcery/enchantment') sits in a semantic field, both in Hebrew usage and cognate Akkadian (kasapu), that overlaps with the use of curse-magic and poison for lethal or coercive harm — a real and taken-seriously category in ANE law on both sides of the ledger: the Code of Hammurabi (§2) imposes its own severe penalties around sorcery accusations, showing this was a live, mutually-recognized legal category across the ancient Near East, not an Israelite peculiarity. The feminine grammatical form reflects that female professional enchanters were the culturally typical practitioners in view (cf. Nahum 3:4; 2 Kings 9:22, 'the whoredoms and sorceries of Jezebel'), not a text targeting women as such — the parallel statute in Leviticus 20:27 explicitly addresses 'a man or a woman' engaged in the same class of practice, showing the concern is the act, not the sex of the actor. In a world with no forensic toxicology, poisoning disguised as curse-craft was a genuine, difficult-to-prosecute danger to communal life, which is plausibly what the statute is actually aimed at, not divination or fortune-telling as such (which Deut 18:10-11 treats under a different, non-capital framework in most cases, grouped with mediums under the same rubric as Lev 20:27). The honest and necessary concession is this: the KJV's blunt 'witch' translation was directly invoked as authorizing text during the European and colonial witch trials, including by name at Salem and in King James I's own *Daemonologie* — a documented historical horror inflicted overwhelmingly on innocent women, and a real moral stain on the Christian societies that carried it out. That application constitutes a serious anachronistic misuse of a bounded ANE theocratic statute — applying Israel's own civil-judicial code (never carried forward as binding on the church, per Aquinas's moral/ceremonial/judicial distinction, ST I-II q.99) to early modern European civil society centuries after the text's original context and audience had passed — rather than a legitimate implementation of it. Naming that history honestly, rather than deflecting from it, is the more credible response than pretending the connection isn't there.