Antioch, under Antiochus The Seven and Their Mother

Antiochus the Fourth, called Epiphanes, ruled the Seleucid empire from Antioch and decided to finish the Jews as a distinct people by abolishing the practice of their religion. The Temple at Jerusalem was rededicated to Olympian Zeus, sacrifice and circumcision and the Sabbath were forbidden on pain of death, and the copies of the Law were burned. The persecution ran from about the year one hundred and sixty seven before Christ, and it was not an attempt to punish crimes but an attempt to make a people stop being what it was.

The second book of Maccabees records what happened when the policy met people who would not comply. First Eleazar, a scribe of the first rank and ninety years old, who was ordered to eat swine's flesh and refused, and who refused as well the offer of his friends to bring him lawful meat and let him pretend, on the ground that the young would learn from the pretense and he would have taught them to apostatize at ninety. He was beaten to death.

Then seven brothers, taken with their mother and tortured one after another in the presence of the king, each given the same choice and each refusing it, and their mother watching all seven die in a single day and encouraging each of them in their own language to take the death. She died last.