220 A History of Judaism
a rage, and gave orders to have pans and cauldrons heated. These were
heated immediately, and he commanded that the tongue of their spokes-
man be cut out and that they scalp him and cut off his hands and feet,
while the rest of the brothers and the mother looked on. When he was
utterly helpless, the king ordered them to take him to the fire, still breath-
ing, and fry him in a pan. The smoke from the pan spread widely, but the
brothers and their mother encouraged one another to die nobly.^28
A cult of martyrdom, in which the spread of stories about heroic
resistance was as crucial as the resistance itself, can be found in many
strands of later Judaism, as we saw in Chapter 6 in Josephus’ descrip-
tion of the Essenes. A hope for resurrection strengthened the resolve
both of these Essenes and of early Christian martyrs, who looked explic-
itly to the Maccabean heroes as their models. In due course rabbis in
late antiquity, from the third century onwards, were to devise their own
martyrdom stories in competition, with grisly but uplifting tales of the
torture to death of R. Akiva by the Romans (see Chapter 10). Already
in the first century the story of the binding of Isaac, which in the orig-
inal version in Genesis constituted a test of Abraham’s willingness to
sacrifice his son at God’s behest, had been altered to emphasize the will-
ingness of Isaac to undergo martyrdom. In Josephus’ rewriting of the
story in the Antiquities, Isaac is said to have been twenty- five years old
when he went up to Mount Moriah with his father, only to be told by
Abraham that he was to be the sacrifice. Isaac responded with approp-
riate piety:
And Isaac, for it was necessary for one who had chanced upon such a
father to be noble in his attitude, received these words with joy; and saying
that it was not even right for him to have been born in the first place, if he
were about to spurn the decision of God and his father and not readily
offer himself to the wishes of both, when if even his father alone were
choosing this it would have been unjust to disobey, he rushed to the altar
and the slaughter.This tradition of Isaac as willing victim is widespread in Jewish litera-
ture in late antiquity, not least the targumim, where its later popularity
may owe something to rivalry with the Christian image of the willing
submission of Jesus to the awful suffering of death by crucifixion.^29
The Judaism for which it was worth dying in the eyes of those martyrs
was the covenant between God and Israel enshrined in the law of Moses,