Learn about Hannah: 

Mother of Seven, 

Hanukkah Heroine, 

Matriarchal Martyr...

Who was Hannah?

Hannah is the mother who witnessed the martyrdom of her seven sons before Antiochus IV, following their refusal to violate their ancestral tradition. Only in the medieval period (in Josippon, 16th cent.) is she identified by Jewish writers as a woman named Hannah, is depicted as so pious and noble that she encourages her own sons to stay fast to their ancestral traditions even if it means guaranteeing their own deaths.

The Story

Shortly before the revolt of Judas Maccabeus (2 Maccabees 8), Antiochus IV Epiphanes arrested a mother and her seven sons, and tried to force them to eat pork. One of the brothers said, on behalf of everyone, that even if they were all to die, they would not break the law. The angry king ordered to heat up the pans and cauldrons, and he ordered the first brother to have his tongue cut off, the skin to be removed from the head and the ends of the limbs cut off – All this was happening in front of the rest of the brothers and mother, who, in the meantime, encouraged each other to passively resist the tormentors' demands. When the first martyr was inert and still breathing, Epiphanes ordered him to be thrown into a hot frying pan. When he died, the next one was brought in and the skin was stripped from his head along with his hair. Each of the seven brothers endured the same torture. The torment of the sons was watched by their tenacious and rather stoic mother, who had lost all her sons.

Hannah's Speeches:

During the ordeal of watching her sons being tortured and murdered, the mother makes two speeches to her youngest and only surviving son in the presence of Antiochus IV himself. These two speeches reveal her complete rejection of Hellenistic culture and philosophy, and a surrender to the will of the One True G!d.

Hannah's First Speech: Resurrection

Antiochus executes the woman’s sons one by one, beginning with the oldest. Immediately before her youngest son is violently killed, the woman makes her first speech. She encourages him to allow himself to be martyred rather than to violate his ancestral tradition.

Hannah affirms her belief in resurrection, which in the second century BCE was a notion in which many Jews believed, but the Greeks (and certain Hellenized Jewish sects, like the Sadducees) did not.

Hannah's Second Speech: Creation Ex Nihilo

Antiochus then appeals to the youngest son by promising him a bribe should he reject his ancestral law, but, in her second speech, his mother reminds him that not only must he reject Greek practice, he must also reject ideas that were regarded as foundational to Greek philosophy. 

From the perspective of Hellenistic culture, the mother is making a bold claim: the widely held belief that the world was eternal and that matter has always existed, a notion that was first articulated in the fourth century BCE by Aristotle, is wrong. In truth, the mother declares, the One True G!d created the world out of nothing, as the Torah itself (in 2 Maccabees’ reading) states. The mother closes her speech by repeating her belief in resurrection, and assuring her sons that after their deaths, she will one day see them again.

Hannah's Death:

The accounts of the manner in which she met her death differ. According to IV Maccabees, she threw herself into the fire. The Midrash states that she lost her reason and threw herself to her death from a roof, while according to Josippon she fell dead on the corpses of her children. The story, along with that of the martyrdom of the aged priest Eleazar (II Macc. 6:18–31), became the subject of the book known as the Fourth Book of Maccabees. In rabbinic literature the story is recounted as an instance of martyrdom during the Hadrianic persecution.

Hannah in the Talmud

The Talmud tells a similar story, but with refusal to worship an idol replacing refusal to eat pork. Tractate Gittin 57b cites Rabbi Judah saying that "this refers to the woman and her seven sons" and the unnamed king is referred to as the "Emperor" and "Caesar". The woman commits suicide in this rendition of the story: she "also went up on to a roof and threw herself down and was killed".

Sources:

Malka Z. Simkovich, "The Faith of the Martyred Mother and her Seven Sons" TheTorah.com (2015). https://thetorah.com/article/the-faith-of-the-martyred-mother-and-her-seven-sons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_with_seven_sons

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hannah-and-her-seven-sons