The mother is praised as a model
of “manly emotion” (7:21), who willingly gives back her sons to God who gave
them to her in the first place. Her appeal to the seventh son to look at the
heavens and the earth is meant to encourage him to recognize that “God did not
make them out of existing things” (7:28; see also 7:11, 22–23). Her statement
has often been interpreted as a biblical basis for the philosophical concept of
creatio ex nihilo (“creation out of
nothing”), though it is doubtful that the writer intended it as a philosophical
statement. (Daniel J.
Harrington, First and Second Maccabees [The New Collegeville Bible
Commentary 12; Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2012], 125-26)
