The Mother Who Sent Seven Sons to Die and Did Not Flinch

The king had a theory about people. His theory was that the body, properly handled, will eventually contradict whatever the mouth has said. He had seen it work before - men who held out through the first round of persuasion, the second, the third, and then the body took over and they ate the food or bowed to the idol or said the word that proved the resistance had only ever been performance. Antiochus IV Epiphanes, king of the Seleucid Empire from 175 to 164 BCE, was not a philosophically inclined man, but on this point he had practical experience.

The woman in Second Maccabees 7 did not fit his theory. She had seven sons. He tortured them one by one in front of her, beginning with the eldest, asking each time whether the young man would now eat pork and demonstrate his submission to the king's authority. Each time the answer was no. Each time the torture proceeded.

The firstborn said: you will strangle us rather than turn us from the laws of our forefathers. The king ordered his tongue cut, his skin flayed, his hands and feet cut off in front of his mother and brothers - and then had him thrown alive into a heated pan. The smoke rose. The brothers stood together. The Book of Maccabees II, composed in Greek around 124 BCE based on Jason of Cyrene's five-volume history, records that each son strengthened his brother to die happily and with a good heart. As though dying together, with intention, was itself a form of winning.

The second son was asked the same question and gave the same answer and died the same way. The third - when they came for his tongue, he put out his hand and said: the Lord our God, these are the bones that you gave me, and with the goodness of my heart I am giving them for the sake of your holy Torah. The fourth died with a quotation from the Psalms on his lips, saying he would wake to an eternal life and Antiochus would never wake. The fifth looked at the king's face and said: do not think that the Lord has forsaken his nation.

The king's theory was failing. The king and his servants were in wonderment at the strength of the young men, at the pains that almost did not exist in their eyes. This was not what the body was supposed to do. The body was supposed to choose its own continuation. These bodies were choosing otherwise.

Then they brought the seventh son, the youngest. And here the Book of Maccabees II does something unexpected: it gives the floor to the mother. Antiochus, calculating, leaned toward her and offered to save the youngest if she would persuade him to comply. He was trying to find the soft point. He had watched the ideology of six sons hold under torture. Maybe the love of a mother for her last child was the lever.

She bent close to her son and spoke to him in the language of their ancestors, Hebrew, so the king could not understand. What she said was not persuasion toward compliance. She told him to look at the heavens and the earth. She told him that God had made them from nothing. She told him that of the same power that created everything from nothing, there was enough left over to restore to him what was being taken. She told him not to fear the butcher. She told him his brothers were waiting. She told him to die and accept death.

The youngest son turned to the king and told him: I do not ask you for mercy, as my brothers did. I ask for mercy only from the Lord. And he died.

Then the mother died. The text notes her death simply, after recording her speech. She had stood and watched every child she had brought into the world die in front of her by the command of a king who thought the body always wins. She had spoken to the last one in a language the king did not understand and told him the truth about the world: that it was made from nothing, and that what is made from nothing can be remade, and that there are things worth dying for because dying for them is itself a form of life.

The mother of the seven sons has no personal name in the Books of Maccabees. Later tradition calls her Hannah, though the name is not original to the text. What the text calls her, in effect, is present: she was there for all of it, she strengthened them, she sent the last one to his death with eyes open. The spirit that made Judah Maccabeus and his men succeed, the same Second Book of Maccabees says, was the spirit of the Lord. But the spirit had been walking in a woman's body for all seven of those deaths before it ever picked up a sword.