Esther (Greek) 5 - New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition 2021

Esther (Greek) 3 Mordecai Refuses to Do Obeisance

¹ After these events King Artaxerxes honored Haman son of Hammedatha, a Bougean, and exalted him, and would seat him first among all the king’s Friends.

² So all who were at court used to do obeisance to Haman, for so the king had commanded to be done. Mordecai, however, did not do obeisance.

³ Then the king’s courtiers said to Mordecai, “Mordecai, why do you disobey the king’s command?”

⁴ Day after day they spoke to him, but he would not listen to them. Then they informed Haman that Mordecai was resisting the king’s command. Mordecai had told them that he was a Jew.

⁵ So when Haman learned that Mordecai was not doing obeisance to him, he became furiously angry

⁶ and resolved to destroy all the Jews under Artaxerxes’s rule.

⁷ In the twelfth year of the reign of Artaxerxes, Haman came to a decision and cast lots, taking the days and the months one by one, to fix on one day to destroy the whole people of Mordecai. The lot fell on the fourteenth day of the month of Adar.

Decree against the Jews

⁸ Then Haman said to King Artaxerxes, “There is a certain nation scattered among the other nations in all your kingdom; their laws are different from those of every other nation, and they do not keep the laws of the king. It is not expedient for the king to tolerate them.

⁹ If it pleases the king, let him decree that they are to be destroyed, and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver into the king’s treasury.”

¹⁰ So the king took off his signet ring and gave it to Haman to seal the decree that was to be written against the Jews.

¹¹ The king told Haman, “Keep the money, and do whatever you want with that nation.”

¹² So on the thirteenth day of the first month the king’s secretaries were summoned, and in accordance with Haman’s instructions they wrote in the name of King Artaxerxes to the magistrates and the governors in every province from India to Ethiopia, one hundred twenty-seven provinces in all, and to the governors of the nations, each in his own language.

¹³ Instructions were sent by couriers throughout all the empire of Artaxerxes to destroy the Jewish people in a single day of the twelfth month, which is Adar, and to plunder their goods. ———