Sanhedrin

Sanhedrin, used to get hear decision by a process, of the wieser speak last.

One of the ancient groups that used deliberation was the “Sanhedrin“. The Sanhedrin were organizations of judges that were active in the period of the second temple of Judea (from around 2nd century BC till about 425 AC). It’s name came from Greek but they conducted their trials not as the ancient citizens of Athens conducted their’s. The Athenians used for their trials Galton’s method by installing in each trial 201 to 1501 citizens that acted as judges. All the hundreds of citizens listen to both sides, and then cast their votes. The Athenians, which probably had intuition about Galton’s method to extract the wisdom of the crowd, asked their judges not to consult each other, to avoid biased verdict, but in realty, the judges did consult each other, and therefore advanced biased answers.

The Sanhedrin approached judgment by another course. They limited the number of judges to 3 in financial cases, and 23 to 71 judges to capital cases. They applied the approach of synthesis to produce their verdict. The convention was that after interrogation of witnesses and seeing evidences, the most junior judge will start offering justifications for the verdict. After him, the next judge in age will continue, until the oldest and wisest will conclude.This procedure could have given the elders, more time to learn from the new comers, and conceptualization more elaborate answers. Then after listening to everybody, all the judges voted on the verdict. In this procedure, the new comers could also have a chance to give fresh propositions, and therefore give the group new insights.