The other day me and the one second-career doctoral student in Jewish studies and I met like we do every week to translate and discuss 4th Maccabees, and we got hung up on this one verb in the description of the martyrdom of the faithful Jew Eleazar, who the ruler was trying to make eat pork and renounce Judaism but wouldn't. We were especially talking about the verb translated as "threw him down" in 4 Maccabees 6:25:
There they burned him with maliciously contrived instruments, threw him down, and poured stinking liquids into his nostrils.
I had thought that the verb should be translated "cast up (on the fire)", since the preceding verse mentioned that they led Eleazar to the fire, though that wouldn't make much sense since his head would have to be hanging off the fire for them to pour liquid down his nostrils, but the second-career doctoral student student thought it was more like "flip over", as if Eleazar was slumped over and they pulled his head back to pour the liquid in.
We discussed this for like ten minutes, as well as a couple other alternatives, and even drew a couple pictures with stick figures on the chalkboard in the library seminar room, and then agreed that we were being very academic about something really really awful that had really happened to someone in the past.
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