The persecution was methodical and savage. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle preserved by Moses Gaster in 1899, Phillipos, the officer left behind by Antiochus, carried out the king's orders with precision. He prohibited the people of Judah from studying the Torah, banned their worship, supported the wicked, and slaughtered many of the Hassidim—the pious faithful.
Two women were discovered who had circumcised their newborn sons. The authorities hanged them by their breasts with their infants and hurled them from the top of a tower. Others fled to caves to observe the Sabbath in secret. When soldiers found them, they sealed the cave entrances and burned everyone alive—men, women, and children who refused to desecrate God's day.
Then came the test of Eleazar, a priest and elder, ninety years old. The authorities ordered him to eat swine's flesh. He refused. They tried to reason with him: just open your mouth and pretend. His friends urged him to accept a substitution—they would secretly place permitted meat before him, and he could eat that instead. No one would know.
Eleazar refused that too. He was ninety years old, he said, and if the young people saw him pretend to violate God's law—even as a ruse—they would think the old man had truly abandoned his faith. "Shall I bring this shame upon my grey hairs?" he asked. Better to die honestly than to live as a fraud. The soldiers beat him with every weapon they had, without pity. As they struck him, Eleazar groaned a final prayer: "O Lord my God, You know I could have saved myself from this death, but I did not wish to, on account of my love for You." He died with those words on his lips, leaving—as the chronicle puts it—"might to his people and power to his young men."