World English Bible · The Persian return
Esther 7
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So the king and came to banquet with the queen. The king said again to on the second day at the banquet of , "What is your petition, queen ? It shall be granted you. What is your request? Even to the half of it shall be performed." Then the queen answered, "If I have in your sight, O king, and if it pleases the king, let my life be given me at my petition, and my people at my request. For we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and to . But if we had been sold for male and female , I would have held my peace, although the adversary could not have compensated for the king's loss." Then King said to the queen, "Who is he, and where is he who dared presume in to do so?" said, "An adversary and an enemy, even this !" Then was afraid before the king and the queen. The king arose in his from the banquet of and went into the palace garden. stood up to make request for his life to the queen, for he saw that there was evil determined against him by the king. Then the king returned out of the palace garden into the place of the banquet of ; and had fallen on the couch where was. Then the king said, "Will he even assault the queen in front of me in the house?" As the word went out of the king's , they covered . Then Harbonah, one of the who were with the king, said, "Behold, the gallows fifty high, which has made for , who spoke good for the king, is standing at house." The king said, "Hang him on it!" So they hanged on the gallows that he had prepared for . Then the king's was pacified.
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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.