34. But they replied, “We will not come out, nor will we obey the king’s command to profane the sabbath.”
35. Then the enemy attacked them at once.
36. But they did not retaliate; they neither threw stones, nor blocked up their secret refuges.
37. They said, “Let us all die in innocence; heaven and earth are our witnesses that you destroy us unjustly.”
38. So the officers and soldiers attacked them on the sabbath, and they died with their wives, their children and their animals, to the number of a thousand persons.
39. When Mattathias and his friends heard of it, they mourned deeply for them.
40. They said to one another, “If we all do as our kindred have done, and do not fight against the Gentiles for our lives and our laws, they will soon destroy us from the earth.”