Therefore, hand their children over to famine, and give them over to the power of the sword. Let their wives become childless and widowed, their husbands slain by deadly disease, their young men struck down by the sword in battle.
Letters were sent by couriers to each of the royal provinces telling the officials to destroy, kill, and annihilate all the Jewish people #– #young and old, women and children #– #and plunder their possessions on a single day, the thirteenth day of Adar, the twelfth month.
So their descendants went in and possessed the land: You subdued the Canaanites who inhabited the land before them and handed their kings and the surrounding peoples over to them, to do as they pleased with them.
The king’s edict gave the Jews in each and every city the right to assemble and defend themselves, to destroy, kill, and annihilate every ethnic and provincial army hostile to them, including women and children, and to take their possessions as spoils of war.