World English Bible

4 Maccabees 8:6-12 World English Bible (WEB)

6. Put confidence in me, then, and you shall receive places of authority in my government, if you forsake your national ordinance,

7. and, conforming to the Greek mode of life, alter your rule, and revel in youth’s delights.

8. For if you provoke me by your disobedience, you will compel me to destroy you, every one, with terrible punishments by tortures.

9. Have mercy, then, upon your own selves, whom I, although an enemy, compassionate for your age and comeliness.

10. Will you not reason upon this—that if you disobey, there will be nothing left for you but to die in tortures?

11. Thus speaking, he ordered the instruments of torture to be brought forward, that very fear might prevail upon them to eat unclean meat.

12. And when the spearman brought forward the wheels, and the racks, and the hooks, and catapults, and caldrons, pans, and finger-racks, and iron hands and wedges, and bellows, the tyrant continue: