The emperor's daughter was found murdered in Rome, and the Romans blamed the Jews. An edict was prepared. The city's Jewish community stood under the shadow of a general massacre if no culprit was produced.
Two brothers from Ludikia (Lod, in the Land of Israel) stepped forward. They confessed to a crime they had not committed, so that the rest of the Jewish community would be spared. The Romans seized them, tortured them through a whole day, cut off their limbs one by one, and finally took their lives. The tradition remembers their names as the two martyrs of Lod, and it does not hide the horror of what was done to them.
But it also insists on the reward. Their souls did not vanish into some vague afterlife. They ascended to the highest place in heaven. No one can stand in their presence, the sages taught, for they sit where others cannot sit. The Talmud in Pesachim 50a speaks of a tier of the righteous so elevated that even the greatest sages of the next world cannot take a seat beside them.
This exemplum, preserved as number 21 in Moses Gaster's 1924 Exempla of the Rabbis, teaches a principle the Jewish tradition has never stopped repeating. Mesirut nefesh, the giving up of one's life to save others, is the summit of righteousness. The brothers of Lod did not choose death to escape life; they chose it so that a community they did not personally know could live. The emperor of Rome killed them with iron, and heaven gave them a seat above the thrones. Two men died, and thousands woke up the next morning still breathing.