4 Macabeos · Septuaginta inglesa de Brenton
4 Macabeos 11 Septuaginta inglesa de Brenton
Notas sobre este texto (2)
- Square brackets mark words Brenton supplied for English sense.
- Old Testament only (no New Testament). First printed 1844; the 1851 edition added the deuterocanonical books.
4 Macabeos no está en PT1904.
1 And when he had died, disfigured in his torments, the fifth leaped forward, and said,
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2 I intend not, O tyrant, to get excused from the torment which is in behalf of virtue.
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3 But I have come of my own accord, that by the death of me, you may owe heavenly vengeance a punishment for more crimes.
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4 O thou hater of virtue and of men, what have we done that thou thus revellest in our blood?
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5 Does it seem evil to thee that we worship the Founder of all things, and live according to his surpassing law?
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6 But this is worthy of honours, not of torments;
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6a hadst thou been capable of the higher feelings of men, and possessed the hope of salvation from God.
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6b Behold, now, being alien from God, thou makest war against those who are religious toward God.
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9 As he said this, the spearbearers bound him, and drew him to the catapelt:
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10 to which binding him at his knees, and fastening them with iron fetters, they bent down his loins upon the wedge of the wheel; and his body was then dismembered, scorpion-fashion.
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11 With his breath thus confined, and his body strangled, he said,
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12 A great favour thou bestowest upon us, O tyrant, by enabling us to manifest our adherence to the law by means of nobler sufferings.
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13 He also being dead, the sixth, quite a youth, was brought out; and on the tyrant asking him whether he would eat and be delivered, he said,
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14 I am indeed younger than my brothers, but in understanding I am as old;
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15 for having been born and reared unto the same end, we are bound to die also in behalf of the same cause.
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16 So that if thou think proper to torment us for not eating the unclean;—torment!
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17 As he said this, they brought him to the wheel.
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18 Extended upon which, with limbs racked and dislocated, he was gradually roasted from beneath.
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19 And having heated sharp spits, they approached them to his back; and having transfixed his sides, they burned away his entrails.
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20 And he, while tormented, said, O period good and holy, in which, for the sake of religion, we brothers have been called to the contest of pain, and have not been conquered.
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21 For religious understanding, O tyrant, is unconquered.
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22 Armed with upright virtue, I also shall depart with my brethren.
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23 I, too, bearing with me a great avenger, O deviser of tortures, and enemy of the truly pious.
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24 We six youths have destroyed thy tyranny.
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25 For is not your inability to overrule our reasoning, and to compel us to eat the unclean, thy destruction?
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26 Your fire is cold to us, your catapelts are painless, and your violence harmless.
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27 For the guards not of a tyrant but of a divine law are our defenders: through this we keep our reasoning unconquered.
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