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.

What sets this account apart from every other martyrdom in the Old Testament is that the martyrs argue. They tell the king exactly why they are choosing to die, and the reason they give is the resurrection of the body. The second brother says the King of the world will raise them up to an everlasting life. The third puts out his tongue and his hands and says he received them from heaven and hopes to receive them back again. The fourth says it is good to die at men's hands looking for the hope from God, and that for the king there will be no resurrection to life.

Their mother says the thing the Church has quoted ever since: that she does not know how they came into her womb, that it was not she who gave them breath and life, and that the Creator of the world who formed the beginning of man will give it back to them again in His mercy. She tells them to look at the heaven and the earth and to know that God made them out of things that were not.

This is why the Church reads them as belonging to Christ. They are killed for the Law, and they die confessing a hope that the Law had not yet made explicit and that only the Resurrection would answer. St. Gregory the Theologian, preaching on their feast, says plainly that they suffered for Christ before Christ suffered, and that no one should think them lesser because they came before the Cross.

Scripture does not name the seven, nor the mother. The tradition of the Church has given them names, and the Menaion keeps them: Abim, Antonius, Gurias, Eleazar, Eusebonus, Alimus and Marcellus, with their mother Solomonia and their teacher Eleazar the scribe, who is honored with them.

Their relics were venerated at Antioch from early times, in a shrine in the Kerateion quarter that was in Christian hands by the fourth century, which is where Chrysostom preached on them and why so much fourth-century Antiochene preaching on the Maccabees survives. Some of the relics were later translated to Rome, to the basilica of St. Peter in Chains.

The Church keeps their memory on the first of August, the day of the Procession of the Precious Cross and the first day of the Dormition fast. The placement is deliberate. The fast opens with the seven and their mother, and with an old man who would not even pretend, in front of a congregation about to be asked to keep two weeks of a comparatively easy discipline.