18. Your firstborn, expiring, turned you not; nor the second, looking miserable in his torments; nor the third, breathing out his soul.
19. Nor when you did behold the eyes of each of them looking sternly upon their tortures, and their nostrils foreboding death, did you weep!
20. When you did see children’s flesh heaped upon children’s flesh that had been torn off, heads decapitated upon heads, dead falling upon the dead, and a choir of children turned through torture into a burying ground, you lamented not.
21. Not so do siren melodies, or songs of swans, attract the hearers to listening, O voices of children calling upon your mother in the midst of torments!
22. With what and what manner of torments was the mother herself tortured, as her sons were undergoing the wheel and the fires!
23. But religious reasoning, having strengthened her courage in the midst of sufferings, enabled her to forego, for the time, parental love.
24. Although beholding the destruction of seven children, the noble mother, after one embrace, stripped off her feelings through faith in God.
25. For just as in a council-room, beholding in her own soul vehement counselors, nature and parentage and love of her children, and the racking of her children,
26. she holding two votes, one for the death, the other for the preservation of her children,
27. did not lean to that which would have saved her children for the safety of a brief space.
28. But this daughter of Abraham remembered his holy fortitude.
29. O holy mother of a nation avenger of the law, and defender of religion, and prime bearer in the battle of the affections!
30. O you nobler in endurance than males, and more manly than men in perseverance!
31. For as the ark of Noah, bearing the world in the world-filling flood, bore up against the waves,
32. so you, the guardian of the law, when surrounded on every side by the flood of passions, and straitened by violent storms which were the torments of they children, did bear up nobly against the storms against religion.