King James Version · The Persian return
Additions to Esther 11
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is.
1In the fourth year of the reign of and Cleopatra, Dositheus, who said he was a priest and , and his son, brought this epistle of Phurim, which they said was the same, and that Lysimachus the son of , that was in , had interpreted it. 2In the second year of the reign of the great, in the first day of the month , the son of , the son of Semei, the son of Cisai, of the tribe of , had a ; 3Who was a , and dwelt in the city of , a great man, being a servitor in the king’s court. 4He was also one of the , which the king of carried from with Jechonias king of ; and this was his : 5Behold a noise of a tumult, with thunder, and earthquakes, and uproar in the land: 6And, behold, two great dragons came forth ready to fight, and their cry was great. 7And at their cry all nations were prepared to battle, that they might fight against people. 8And lo a day of and obscurity, tribulation and anguish, affliction and great uproar, upon earth. 9And the whole nation was troubled, fearing their own evils, and were ready to . 10Then they cried unto , and upon their cry, as it were from a little fountain, was made a great flood, even much water. 11 and the sun rose up, and the lowly were exalted, and devoured the . 12Now when , who had seen this , and what had determined to do, was awake, he this in , and until night by all means was desirous to know it.
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.