4 Maccabees 9

1What are you waiting for, O tyrant? For we are ready to die rather than transgress the commandments of our fathers.

2For we would rightly bring shame on our ancestors if we did not make use of obedience to the law as our counselor and judgment.

3Counselor of lawlessness, tyrant, do not hate us; rather, have mercy on us more than on them.

4For we consider your pity for our unlawful deliverance to be harsher than death itself.

5But you are trying to frighten us by threatening us with death through tortures, as though you had not learned from Eleazar a little while ago.

6But if the old men of the Hebrews died after enduring tortures because of godliness, how much more rightly should we, the young men, die, having disregarded the tortures of your compulsion, which the aged instructor also conquered.

7Go on, then, tyrant; and if you kill our lives because of godliness, do not suppose that by torturing us you are harming us.

8For through this suffering and endurance, we will indeed carry off the prizes of virtue,

9But because of our sacred murder, you will, by divine justice, endure a sufficient eternal torment by fire.

10When they said these things, the tyrant was angered not only as against men who were disobedient, but was also enraged as against the ungrateful.

11So, when they were ordered to do so, the torturers brought forward the eldest of them, and after tearing open his tunic, they bound his hands and arms on both sides with straps.

12But when they grew weary from striking him with whips, accomplishing nothing, they put him on the wheel.

13As he was stretched over it, the noble young man was being disjointed.

14And, being broken limb by limb, he kept accusing them, saying,

15Most defiled tyrant, enemy of heavenly justice, and savage-minded man, you are not torturing me in this way because I have committed murder, nor because I have acted impiously, but because I am defending the divine law.

16And when the bodyguards were saying, “Agree to eat, so that you may be released,”

17But he said, “Your device is not so strong, you limbs of a demon, as to lead my reason away. Cut off my limbs, and burn my flesh, and wrench my joints.”

18For through all the tortures I will convince you that only the sons of the Hebrews

19They are unconquerable on behalf of virtue. While he was still saying these things, they spread fire beneath him, and, by intensifying the wheel, they tightened it further.

20And the wheel was defiled all around with blood, and the heap of coals was being quenched by the drops of bodily fluids, and the flesh was flowing around the axles of the machine.

21And though the framework of his bones was already burned all around, the noble-minded and Abraham-like young man did not groan.

22but, as though being transformed in the fire into incorruptibility, he nobly endured these

23Imitate me, brothers, he said, on the rack; do not desert by abandoning the struggle when I have not left it, nor through me renounce the brotherhood of courage. Wage the holy and noble campaign for godliness,

24through which our righteous and ancestral providence, having become gracious to the nation, might punish the accursed tyrant.

25And after saying this, the devout young man breathed his last.

26And when all had marveled at his steadfast courage, the guards led in the second after the first in age, and after fitting iron claws onto his hands, they bound him to the instruments and the catapult.

27And when they asked whether he wished to eat before being tortured, they heard his noble resolve,

28Dragging him by the tendons with their iron hands, the leopard-like beasts stripped away all his flesh, even to his beard, and the skin of his head; but as he endured this grievous pain steadfastly, he said,

29How sweet every kind of death is for our ancestral godliness! And he spoke to the tyrant,

30Do you not think, O most savage tyrant of all, that you are now being tortured more than I am, seeing the proud reasoning of your tyranny being conquered by our endurance for the sake of godliness?

31For I, by the pleasures that come through virtue, lighten the pain.

32But you, by the threats of your ungodliness, are being tortured; and you will not escape, most defiled tyrant, the punishments of divine wrath.