4 Maccabees11

When he had died, disfigured in his torments, the fifth leaped forward, and said,

“I don’t intend, O tyrant, to get excused from the torment which is on behalf of virtue.

But I have come of my own accord, that by my death you may owe heavenly vengeance and punishment for more crimes.

O you hater of virtue and of men, what have we done that you thus revel in our blood?

Does it seem evil to you that we worship the Founder of all things, and live according to his surpassing law?

But this is worthy of honors, not torments,

if you had been capable of the higher feelings of men, and possessed the hope of salvation from God.

Behold now, being alien from God, you make war against those who are religious toward God.”

As he said this, the spearbearers bound him and drew him to the rack,

to which binding him at his knees, and fastening them with iron fetters, they bent down his loins upon the wedge of the wheel; and his body was then dismembered, scorpion-fashion.

With his breath thus confined, and his body strangled, he said,

“A great favor you bestow upon us, O tyrant, by enabling us to manifest our adherence to the law by means of nobler sufferings.”

He also being dead, the sixth, quite a youth, was brought out. On the tyrant asking him whether he would eat and be delivered, he said,

“I am indeed younger than my brothers, but in understanding I am as old.

I was born and reared to the same end. We are bound to die also on behalf of the same cause.

So if you think it is proper to torment us for not eating the unclean, then torment!”

As he said this, they brought him to the wheel.

Extended upon this, with limbs racked and dislocated, he was gradually roasted from beneath.

Having heated sharp spits, they approached them to his back; and having transfixed his sides, they burned away his entrails.

He, while tormented, said, “O good and holy contest, in which for the sake of religion, we kindred have been called to the arena of pain, and have not been conquered.

For religious understanding, O tyrant, is unconquered.

Armed with upright virtue, I also will depart with my kindred.

I, too, bearing with me a great avenger, O inventor of tortures, and enemy of the truly pious.

We six youths have destroyed your tyranny.

For isn’t your inability to overrule our reasoning, and to compel us to eat the unclean, your destruction?

Your fire is cold to us. Your racks are painless, and your violence harmless.

For the guards not of a tyrant but of a divine law are our defenders. Through this we keep our reasoning unconquered.”