Chapter 54

¹ But someone will say: “These are plausible conjectures you are making.”

² Be instructed, O man, in the things that came to pass under Antiochus.

³ When the seven brothers, arrested together with their mother, were being beaten with whips and scourges, one of them answered and said: “Why do you delay to question and to learn? For we are ready to die rather than to transgress the laws of our fathers.”

⁴ Enraged at this, the king ordered pans and cauldrons to be heated red-hot at once, and he ordered the one who had become their spokesman to have his tongue cut out, and that, after scalping him, they should mutilate him while the rest of the brothers looked on. And as the steam of the pan spread abroad in abundance, they encouraged one another in their fathers’ tongue, saying: “The Lord God watches over us, and in truth is moved to compassion upon us, just as Moses long ago made plain through the song spoken face to face, saying: ‘And he will be moved to compassion upon his servants.’”