The Mother and Her Seven Sons

The trouble in Jerusalem had begun with money — men buying the office of chief priest from the king, and one of them having the old chief priest murdered.

Then the king sent an old man from Athens to make the Jews stop being Jews. The temple was given a new name, the temple of Olympian Zeus, and strangers ate and drank as they pleased in the holy courts. Nobody could keep the Sabbath or the feasts, and a man could not say out loud that he was a Jew. Once a month, on the king’s birthday, they were driven to eat meat from the idols’ sacrifices, and at the wine-god’s feast to wear ivy and walk in the procession. Two women were brought in for having their babies marked with the covenant sign, and were carried through the city with their babies and thrown from the wall. Others had run into caves to keep the seventh day in secret, and were burned there, because they would not lift a hand to defend themselves on that day.

And there was a man in Jerusalem named Eleazar, one of the chief teachers of the law, ninety years old. They forced his mouth open to make him eat pig’s meat, and he spat it out; and he walked to the place of the beating on his own feet, rather than live filthy. But the men in charge took him aside — they had known him for years — and made him an offer: bring your own meat and eat that, and let everybody think it is the king’s sacrifice. Nobody will know, and you need not die. And Eleazar said, “It does not suit a man of my years to pretend. Young men would hear that Eleazar at ninety had gone over to a foreign way of living, and they would be led astray on my account — and all for the sake of a little scrap of life. I would win nothing but a stain on my old age. And even if I got out of the hands of men just now, I could not get out of the hands of the Almighty, alive or dead. So I will give my life up bravely, and leave the young a fine example of how to die gladly and nobly for laws that are holy.” Then he walked back to the beating. The men who had liked him a minute before turned and hated him: what he said sounded like madness to them. Under the blows, when he was nearly gone, he said, “The Lord knows, who knows everything, that I could have got out of this. My body is in cruel pain. But in my soul I am glad to suffer it, because I fear him.” And so he died, and left his death behind as an example.

Then seven brothers were arrested with their mother and beaten, to make them eat pig’s meat. The oldest spoke for them all: “What do you want to ask us, and to learn from us? We are ready to die rather than break the laws of our fathers.” The king flew into a rage and had pans heated red hot. Then they cut that young man and burned him, in front of his mother and his brothers, and he died. And the others and their mother said to one another, “The Lord God is watching. He has not forgotten us. Moses said so in the song, long ago: he will be comforted over his servants.” They brought the second one out and asked, “Will you eat, before your body is punished piece by piece?” He answered in his own people’s language, one word: “No.” So they did to him as they had done to his brother; and with his last breath he said, “You wretch. You take us out of this life — but the King of the world will raise us up to live again forever, because we die for his laws.”

Then the third. When they asked for his tongue he put it straight out, and held his hands out too, and said, “I got these from heaven, and for the sake of his laws I think nothing of them; and from him I hope to get them back again.” Even the king was astonished at how little he thought of his own pain. Then the fourth, and at the end he said, “It is better to die at the hands of men and keep the hope God gives, that he will raise us up again. For you there will be no rising to life.” Then the fifth, looking the king in the face: “You have power over men and do as you please — and you are a man who will die. Do not think God has left our people. Wait, and watch his great strength, and see how he deals with you.” Then the sixth, dying: “Do not fool yourself. We are suffering because of ourselves; we sinned against our own God. But do not think you will get away with it, you who have taken it on yourself to fight God.”

The mother was the most astonishing of them all. She watched seven sons die in one day and bore it with a good heart, because of what she hoped from the Lord. She spoke to each of them in their own old language: “I do not know how you came to be in my body. I did not give you your breath and your life, and it was not I who arranged the parts of you. So the Maker of the world, who made people in the beginning, will give you back your breath and your life out of his mercy — because you count yourselves as nothing now for the sake of his laws.”

The youngest boy was still alive. The king swore to make him rich and count him a friend if he would only turn from the ways of his fathers, and the boy would not so much as look at him. So the king called the mother over to talk her son into saving himself; and she agreed to persuade him. She leaned close to her son, and made a mock of the cruel king, and said in the old language, “My son, have pity on me. I carried you nine months in my body. I fed you for three years. I brought you up to the size you are. Now look up at the sky, child, and look at the earth, and see everything in them, and know that God did not make them out of things that were already there — and people are made the same way. Do not be afraid of the man who is killing you. Be worthy of your brothers. Take your death, so that in the mercy I may get you back again, and your brothers with you.” She had hardly finished when the boy said, “What are you all waiting for? I do not obey the king. I obey the law given to our fathers through Moses. We are suffering because of our own sins. Our Lord has been angry with us a little while, to teach us; and he will be friends with his servants again. But you — do not raise your hand against the servants of heaven. You have not escaped the judgment of Almighty God. My brothers, after a short pain, have come under God’s promise of life that never runs dry. And I, like my brothers, give up my body and my life for the laws of our fathers, and I call on God to have mercy on our nation soon, and to bring you to admit that he alone is God, and to let his anger stop with me and my brothers.” The king treated this one worse than any of them. So the boy died clean, trusting the Lord. And last of all, after her seven sons, the mother died.

Judas and his men were out in the hills through all this, and in the end took the city and the temple back and cleaned the sanctuary. Then they kept eight days of gladness — and kept them the way you keep the Feast of Tents, with leafy branches and palms in their hands and songs to the One who had brought them through; because the year before, when the Feast of Tents came, they had been living in mountain caves like animals and could not keep it.

The fighting was not over. In the town of Joppa the townspeople invited the Jews who lived among them out in boats for the day, with their wives and children, as though nothing had ever been wrong; the whole town voted on it. The Jews suspected nothing and went; and out in deep water the men of Joppa drowned them, two hundred people. Judas came at night and burned the harbor and the boats; and hearing that Jamnia meant the same, he burned that harbor too, and the blaze was seen in Jerusalem, thirty miles away.

After one of the battles Judas and his men went back to gather up their own dead. Under the shirt of every man who had fallen they found little idols from Jamnia, which the law forbids; and so they knew why they had died. They prayed for that sin to be wiped out. Then Judas took up a collection, man by man, and sent the silver to Jerusalem for an offering for that sin — because he was expecting the dead to rise. If he had not been, praying for the dead would have been a useless thing to do.

Last of all there was a general named Nicanor, who had made friends with Judas and then turned on him and threatened to level the temple. He decided to attack on the day of rest, when there would be no risk. And the Jews who were made to march in his army said, “Do not kill them so savagely. Give honor instead to the day the One who watches over everything has made holy. There is a living Lord, and he is Sovereign in heaven, and he is the one who told us to keep the seventh day.” And Nicanor said, “And I am a sovereign on earth, and I give the order to take up arms and do the king’s business.” He did not manage it, all the same.

Judas told his men not to be frightened, and told them a dream that made them glad. He had seen Onias, the old chief priest, a good man gentle with people, holding his hands out and praying for the whole nation; and beside him a gray-haired man of wonderful dignity. “This is Jeremiah, the prophet of God,” Onias said, “who prays and prays for the people and the holy city.” And Jeremiah held his right hand out and gave Judas a golden sword: “Take this holy sword. It is a gift from God. With it you will break your enemies.”

In the morning the enemy stood drawn up, war animals in place, and Judas stretched his hands toward heaven: “Master, in the days of Hezekiah king of Judea you sent your messenger, and he struck down a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in Sennacherib’s camp. Send a good messenger ahead of us now.” That was all he said. Nicanor’s men came on with trumpets and battle songs; Judas’s men came on fighting with their hands and praying with their hearts. Thirty-five thousand of Nicanor’s army fell that day, and coming back the Jews found Nicanor dead in his armor. They cut off his head and carried it to Jerusalem and hung it from the citadel for everybody to see; and they voted to mark that day every year.

And that was the end of Nicanor.