12
and, reverencing my kindly admonition, have pity upon your own years?
13
For, bear in mind, that if there be any power which watches over this religion of yours, it will pardon you for all transgressions of the law which you commit through compulsion.
14
While the tyrant incited him in this manner to the unlawful eating of flesh, Eleazar begged permission to speak.
15
And having received power to speak, he began thus to deliver himself:
16
We, O Antiochus, who are persuaded that we live under a divine law, consider no compulsion to be so forcible as obedience to that law;
17
wherefore we consider that we ought not in any point to transgress the law.
18
And indeed, were our law (as you suppose) not truly divine, and if we wrongly think it divine, we should have no right even in that case to destroy our sense of religion.
19
think not eating the unclean, then, a trifling offense.
20
For transgression of the law, whether in small or great matters, is of equal moment;
21
for in either case the law is equally slighted.
22
But thou deridest our philosophy, as though we lived irrationally in it.