Suicide in Jewish legal and religious tradition

While God's primordial warning that He will require a reckoning for the blood shed by suicide has lost nothing of its admonitory and deterrent purpose, Jewish law, as it developed in the course of time, in actual practice takes cognizance only of two kinds of suicide: One that is permissible, by reason of its motivation, and that may in given situations even be highly laudable; and one that is the outcome or symptom of mental disturbances or otherwise legally excusable. Nor is the law relating to suicide the only instance where Jewish jurisprudence succeeded in neutralizing threats of divine punishment by an embarras de richesse of human justifications.