19. but think not you that you shall be unpunished, having assayed to fight against God.
20. But above all was the mother marvelous and worthy of honorable memory; for when she looked on seven sons perishing within the space of one day, she bare the sight with a good courage for the hopes that she had set on the Lord.
21. And she exhorted each one of them in the language of their fathers, filled with a noble temper and stirring up her womanish thought with manly passion, saying to them,
22. I know not how you⌃ came into my womb, neither was it I that bestowed on you your spirit and your life, and it was not I that brought into order the first elements of each one of you.
23. Therefore the Creator of the world, who fashioned the generation of man and devised the generation of all things, in mercy gives back to you again both your spirit and your life, as you⌃ now contemn your own selves for his laws’ sake.
24. But Antiochus, thinking himself to be despised, and suspecting the reproachful voice, while the youngest was yet alive did not only make his appeal to him by words, but also at the same time promised with oaths that he would enrich him and raise him to high estate, if he would turn from the customs of his fathers, and that he would take him for his Friend and intrust him with affairs.
25. But when the young man would in no wise give heed, the king called to him his mother, and exhorted her that she would counsel the lad to save himself.
26. And when he had exhorted her with many words, she undertook to persuade her son.
27. But bending toward him, laughing the cruel tyrant to scorn, she spoke thus in the language of her fathers: My son, have pity upon me that carried you nine months in my womb, and gave you suck three years, and nourished and brought you up to this age, and sustained you.
28. I beseech you, my child, to lift your eyes to the heaven and the earth, and to see all things that are therein, and thus to recognize that God made them not of things that were, and that the race of men in this wise comes into being.
29. Fear not this butcher, but, proving yourself worthy of your brethren, accept your death, that in the mercy of God I may receive you again with your brethren.