Greek Esther 4
4
Mordecai Asks for Esther's Help
1 When Mordecai learnt of all that had been done, he tore his clothes in anguish. Then he dressed in sackcloth, covered his head with ashes, and ran through the city crying loudly, “An innocent nation is being destroyed!” 2 When he came to the entrance of the palace, he stopped. He did not go in because no one covered in sackcloth and ashes was allowed inside. 3 Throughout all the provinces, wherever the king's proclamation was made known, there was loud mourning among the Jews. They wept, wailed, and put on sackcloth and ashes.
4 When Esther's slave women and eunuchs told her what Mordecai was doing, she was deeply disturbed. She sent Mordecai some clothes to put on instead of the sackcloth, but he would not accept them. 5 Then she called Hathach, one of the palace eunuchs appointed as her servant, and told him to go to Mordecai and get the details of what was happening.#4.6 some manuscripts add verse 6: Hathach went to Mordecai in the city square at the entrance to the place. 7 Mordecai told him everything that had happened and how Haman had promised to put 340 tonnes of silver into the royal treasury if all the Jews were killed. 8 He gave Hathach a copy of the proclamation that had been issued in Susa, ordering the destruction of the Jews. Mordecai asked him to take it to Esther so that she might go and plead with the king and beg him to have mercy on her people. “Tell her,” he said, “to remember the days when she was just an ordinary person being brought up under my care. Now, since Haman, the king's prime minister, has spoken against us and demands our death, she must pray to the Lord and then speak to the king about us. She must save us from death.”
9 So Hathach did this, 10 and Esther gave him this message to take back to Mordecai: 11 “If anyone, man or woman, goes to the inner courtyard and sees the king without being summoned, that person will be sentenced to death. Everyone in the empire knows that. Only if the king holds out his gold sceptre to him can his life be spared. But it has been a month now since the king has sent for me.”
12 When Mordecai received Esther's message, 13 he sent her this warning: “Esther, don't imagine that you are safer than any of the other Jews in the empire. 14 If you keep quiet at a time like this, help will come to the Jews in some other way and they will be saved, but you will die and your father's family will come to an end. Yet, who knows? Maybe it was for a time like this that you were made queen!”
15 Esther sent Mordecai this reply: 16 “Go and gather all the Jews in Susa together; hold a fast and pray for me. Don't eat or drink anything for three days and nights. My slave women and I will be doing the same. After that, I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. If I must die for doing it, I will die.”
17 Mordecai then left and did everything that Esther had told him to do.
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Greek Esther 4: GNBDC
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Good News Bible. Scripture taken from the Good News Bible (r) (Today's English Version Second Edition, UK/British Edition). Copyright © 1992 British & Foreign Bible Society. Used by permission.