King James Version · The Persian return
Additions to Esther 10
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is.
1… 2… 3… 4The rest of the chapters of the Book of , which are found neither in the , nor the Chaldee. Then said, hath done these things. 5For I remember a which I saw concerning these matters, and nothing thereof hath failed. 6A little fountain became a river, and there was , and the sun, and much water: this river is , whom the king married, and made queen: 7And the two dragons are I and . 8And the nations were those that were assembled to destroy the name of the : 9And my nation is this Israel, which cried to , and were : for hath his people, and hath us from all those evils, and hath wrought signs and great wonders, which have not been done among the . 10Therefore hath he made two lots, one for the people of , and another for all the . 11And these two lots came at the hour, and time, and day of , before among all nations. 12So remembered his people, and his . 13Therefore those days shall be unto them in the month , the fourteenth and fifteenth day of the same month, with an , and joy, and with gladness before , according to the generations for ever among his people.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · The Persian return, 539 BC to 332 BC ›
Persia takes Babylon and reverses its policy, sending exiled peoples home to rebuild their temples. Judah returns as a small province, rebuilding under imperial permission rather than independence.
- Persia
- The largest empire the world had yet seen, from the Indus to the Aegean, run through provinces, a royal road, and a postal system. Its policy on conquered peoples was to send them home and fund their temples, in exchange for loyalty and prayers for the king. The Cyrus Cylinder states the policy in Cyrus's own words, and Ezra opens with the same policy applied to Judah.
- Judah
- A small, poor province called Yehud, a fraction of the old kingdom, with a rebuilt temple that made the people who remembered the first one weep. No king, and no prospect of one. Leadership passes to priests and scribes, which shapes everything afterward.
- Greece
- Persia and Greece collide at Marathon and Salamis, Persia loses, and Athens spends the following decades on the Parthenon, tragedy, and Socrates. Herodotus writes the first history in order to explain that war. Then Plato and Aristotle, whose vocabulary the church will still be using at Nicaea eight centuries later.
- Further afield
- Rome throws out its kings and becomes a republic. In India and China this is the age of the Buddha's early followers and of Confucian teaching taking hold. More of what the world still thinks with was invented in this era than in almost any other.