4 Maccabees 11

¹When he had died, disfigured in his torments, the fifth leaped forward, and said, ²“I don’t intend, O tyrant, to get excused from the torment which is on behalf of virtue. ³But I have come of my own accord, that by my death you may owe heavenly vengeance and punishment for more crimes. ⁴O you hater of virtue and of men, what have we done that you thus revel in our blood? ⁵Does it seem evil to you that we worship the Founder of all things, and live according to his surpassing law? ⁶But this is worthy of honors, not torments, ⁷if you had been capable of the higher feelings of men, and possessed the hope of salvation from God. ⁸Behold now, being alien from God, you make war against those who are religious toward God.”

⁹As he said this, the spearbearers bound him and drew him to the rack, ¹⁰to 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. ¹¹With his breath thus confined, and his body strangled, he said, ¹²“A great favor you bestow upon us, O tyrant, by enabling us to manifest our adherence to the law by means of nobler sufferings.”

¹³He 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, ¹⁴“I am indeed younger than my brothers, but in understanding I am as old. ¹⁵I was born and reared to the same end. We are bound to die also on behalf of the same cause. ¹⁶So if you think it is proper to torment us for not eating the unclean, then torment!”

¹⁷As he said this, they brought him to the wheel. ¹⁸Extended upon this, with limbs racked and dislocated, he was gradually roasted from beneath. ¹⁹Having heated sharp spits, they stabbed them into his back; and having pierced his sides, they burned away his entrails. ²⁰He, 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. ²¹For religious understanding, O tyrant, is unconquered. ²²Armed with upright virtue, I also will depart with my kindred. ²³I, too, bearing with me a great avenger, O inventor of tortures, and enemy of the truly pious. ²⁴We six youths have destroyed your tyranny. ²⁵For isn’t your inability to overrule our reasoning, and to compel us to eat the unclean, your destruction? ²⁶Your fire is cold to us. Your racks are painless, and your violence harmless. ²⁷For the guards not of a tyrant but of a divine law are our defenders. Through this we keep our reasoning unconquered.”