The Strength of a Mother's Love

1 Reasoning of the children, master over the emotions! Piety, more precious to the mother than her children! 2 The mother had two things set before her: piety, or the safety of her seven sons for a time, as the tyrant had promised. 3 She loved piety more, which preserves them for eternal life according to God. 4 How can I describe the love of parents for their children? They stamp a wonderful likeness of soul and form on the small nature of a child, especially because mothers feel the sufferings of their children more deeply than fathers do.⁠a 5 For the weaker in spirit mothers are, and the more children they bear, the more they love their children. 6 Of all mothers, the mother of the seven loved her children the most, since through seven pregnancies she had grown a deep love for them, 7 and because of the many birth pains she had suffered with each one, she could not help but feel for them. 8 Yet because of her fear of God, she disregarded the temporary safety of her children. 9 Not only that, but because of her sons’ nobility and their readiness to obey the law, her love for them was even greater. 10 For they were just, self-controlled, courageous, high-minded, loving toward their brothers, and so loving toward their mother that they obeyed her by keeping the law even to death. 11 Yet although there were so many reasons connected with her love for her children to draw the mother toward sympathy, in none of them were the many different tortures able to change her reasoning. 12 Instead, she urged each child separately, and all of them together, to die for piety. 13 Holy nature, parents’ affection, yearning for one’s offspring, the bond of nursing, and the unconquerable feelings of mothers! 14 Watching each one tortured and burned, the mother did not change her mind, because of piety. 15 She watched her children’s flesh melting in the fire, their toes and fingers twitching on the ground, and the flesh of their heads, down to their chins, hanging like masks. 16 Mother, tested now by more bitter pains than those of childbirth! 17 The only woman who gave birth to perfect piety! 18 Your firstborn breathing his last did not change you, nor the second looking at you pitifully in his torments, nor the third breathing out his life. 19 Nor did you weep when you saw the eyes of each one staring boldly at the same tortures, and their nostrils signaling their approaching death. 20 When you saw children’s flesh burned away upon children’s flesh, hands cut off upon hands, heads cut off upon heads, and the dead falling on the dead, and saw the place made a mass grave of your children by the tortures, you did not cry. 21 No siren’s song or swan’s voice draws its listeners as powerfully as the voices of children calling to their mother in the midst of torture. 22 How great and how many were the tortures the mother herself suffered as her sons were tortured on the wheel and with hot irons! 23 But religious reasoning gave her heart courage in the midst of her emotions and strengthened her to disregard, for the moment, her love for her children. 24 Although she saw the destruction of seven children and the many different kinds of torture, the noble mother let go of all of it through her faith in God. 25 For as though in a council chamber, she saw in her own soul powerful advisers: nature, motherhood, love of children, and the torture of her children. 26 Holding two votes, one bringing death to her children and one bringing them safety, 27 she did not choose the one that would have saved her seven sons for a short time. 28 Instead, as a daughter of Abraham, she remembered his God-fearing endurance.

Praise for the Mother

29 Mother of the nation, defender of the law, champion of piety, and winner of the contest within your heart! 30 More noble than men in endurance, and braver than men in perseverance! 31 Just as Noah’s ark, carrying the world in the world-flooding deluge, endured the waves,⁠b 32 so you, guardian of the law, though overwhelmed on every side by the flood of your emotions and battered by the strong winds of your sons’ tortures, nobly endured the storms for the sake of piety.