King James Version · The Persian return
Esther 7
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
So the king and came to banquet with the queen. And the king said again unto on the second day at the banquet of , What is thy petition, queen ? and it shall be granted thee: and what is thy request? and it shall be performed, even to the half of . Then the queen answered and said, If I have found in thy sight, O king, and if it please 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 bondmen and bondwomen, I had held my , although could not countervail the king’s damage. Then the king answered and said unto the queen, Who is he, and where is he, that durst presume in to do so? And said, and enemy is this . Then was afraid before the king and the queen. And the king arising from the banquet of in his went into the palace garden: and 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 was fallen upon the bed whereon was. Then said the king, Will he force the queen also before me in the house? As the word went out of the king’s , they covered ’s . And Harbonah, one of the chamberlains, said before the king, Behold also, the gallows fifty high, which had made for , who had spoken good for the king, standeth in the house of . Then the king said, Hang him thereon. So they hanged on the gallows that he had prepared for . Then was the king’s pacified.
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.