Introduction

A NOTE ON THIS RENDERING

THE WITNESS — A DIFFERENT BOOK, NOT A DIFFERENT DRESS

This Ester is set, at the reader’s asking, from the SEPTUAGINT — the Greek Old Testament — in the public-domain English of Sir Lancelot Brenton (1851), the House’s base for Nechemyah, Ezra, and the Makabim. But where Nechemyah and Ezra were the same book re-voiced in Greek, the Greek ESTER is a substantially DIFFERENT book. It is a free and expanded rendering that (1) names Elohim on nearly every page; (2) carries SIX great ADDITIONS (A–F) absent from the Hebrew — a dream, two royal decrees, two prayers, a throne-scene, and an interpretation with a dating colophon; and (3) sets those Additions in their proper NARRATIVE places, so the book reads as one continuous Greek story of open divine rescue. This volume does not replace the Hebrew Ester (#35, KJV, from the Masoretic); it stands beside it as its opposite number.

THE TWO ESTERS — THE CURTAIN DOWN AND THE CURTAIN UP

The Masoretic Ester is famous for one thing above all: in ten chapters IT NEVER ONCE NAMES ELOHIM. Providence runs the whole story from behind a curtain that never lifts — the coincidences of a sleepless night, a remembered kindness, a banquet, a gallows. The Greek Ester is the same deliverance with the curtain UP: Elohim removes the king’s sleep (6:1), Elohim changes the king’s heart to gentleness (Add. D5), the enemy’s own household confess “the living Elohim is with him” (6:13), and Mordechai ends by saying “these things have been done of Elohim” (Add. F1). The House keeps BOTH witnesses, for together they teach what neither teaches alone: that the hidden hand of the Hebrew and the named hand of the Greek are the same hand. The one book dares you to see Him where He is never mentioned; the other says aloud what the first only implies.

THE SIX ADDITIONS, IN THEIR PLACES

The Greek weaves in six sections the Hebrew lacks, and the House sets each where the Greek has it, under its own rubric. ADDITION A opens the book with Mordechai’s apocalyptic DREAM — two serpents, a righteous nation crying to Elohim, a little fountain becoming a river — and his uncovering of the eunuchs’ plot. ADDITION B gives the full text of Haman’s decree of extermination. ADDITION C gives the PRAYERS of Mordechai (who explains at last that he would not bow lest he set the glory of man above the glory of Elohim) and of Ester (who strips off her crown for ashes and pleads as a daughter of Yisra’el). ADDITION D dramatises her fainting approach to the throne, where Elohim turns the king’s heart. ADDITION E gives the full text of the COUNTER-DECREE. ADDITION F interprets the dream and adds the colophon. The Additions are numbered A–F with letter-verses so they never collide with the Hebrew chapter-and-verse.

ESTER MADE PIOUS

The Hebrew Ester hides her people, marries the king, and eats at the palace. The Greek Ester is a devout keeper of the covenant. In her prayer (Add. C) she declares she “abhors the couch of the uncircumcised,” has “not eaten at the table of Haman,” has “not drunk wine of libations,” and loathes her royal crown “as a menstruous cloth.” And where the Hebrew says only that Mordechai raised her, the Greek says he “brought her up for a wife for himself” (2:7) — a reading known also to the sages. The Greek has made her a pious Jewess of the Hellenistic age; the House prints her as the Greek drew her, and names the Hebrew here.

THE SONS OF THE LIVING ELOHIM

The most startling line in the book is in the mouth of a pagan king. In the counter-decree (Add. E14–15), Artachshasta declares that the Yehudim “are not malefactors, but living according to the justest laws, and being THE SONS OF THE LIVING ELOHIM, the most high and mighty.” A Persian edict confessing Yisra’el as sons of the living Elohim — the very title the Besorah takes up (Hoshea 1:10; Romans 9:26; “the church of the living Elohim,” 1 Timothyos 3:15). Printed as the Greek has it.

THE NAMES THE GREEK CHANGES

The Septuagint names the king ARTACHSHASTA (Artaxerxes) where the Hebrew has Achashverosh; the queen it deposes is VASHTI (Greek Astin); and it recasts Haman not as “the Agagite” of the Hebrew but as “the Bugaean” and even “a Macedonian” (Add. E9; 9:24) — an alien to Persia, in the polemic of the Hellenistic age. Each form is Hebraised to its own dress and the Greek reading named here, never merged into the verse. Rule X.4.

THE DREAM THAT FRAMES IT ALL

Additions A and F are a frame: the dream at the start (A) and its interpretation at the end (F). The little fountain that becomes a river is Ester; the two serpents are Mordechai and Haman; the nations that gather for battle are those that combined to destroy the name of the Yehudim; and the light and the sun that rise are the deliverance of “they that cried to Elohim, and were delivered.” The Greek reads the whole Purim story as apocalyptic — a rehearsal of the yom of judgment, when Elohim “ordained two lots, one for the am of Elohim, and one for all the other nations” (F7). What looks in the Hebrew like palace intrigue, the Greek reads as a shadow of the last things.

THE COLOPHON

The book closes (Add. F11) with a historical note found in no other biblical book: that in the fourth year of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, Dositheus and his son Ptolemy brought the “letter of Purim” to Egypt, which Lysimachus son of Ptolemy “who was in Yerushalayim had interpreted.” It names the translator and roughly dates the Greek Ester to the late second or early first century before the Messiah — a rare, precious window onto how a book of Scripture came to be turned into Greek. Printed as it stands.

PURIM

The feast is named at 9:26: “these yamim were called PURIM, because of the lots.” The Greek transliterates the Persian word for the LOT that Haman cast (3:7) to fix the yom of destruction — the lot the enemy threw, which Elohim overturned into a yom of gladness. The keeping of it — the fourteenth and fifteenth of Adar, with feasting, and “sending portions to their friends, and to the poor” (9:22) — is the mishloach-manot and matanot-la’evyonim of Purim to this yom. The Greek adds that the feast is kept “before Elohim” (F10), which the Hebrew, keeping its curtain, does not say.

THE TONGUE

Brenton’s Greek forms — Artaxerxes, Mardochaeus, Aman, Astin, Achrathaeus, Zosara, Bugathan, Phrurae — are set in the House manner as ARTACHSHASTA, MORDECHAI, HAMAN, VASHTI, HATHACH, ZERESH, CHARVONAH, PURIM. The load-bearing Hebrew terms and the Name YAHUAH (Brenton’s “Lord,” the Greek Kyrios) and ELOHIM (Brenton’s “God”) are restored to their own dress. Counts that SIGNIFY are Hebraised; the census of the slain, the talents, the cubits, the hundred and twenty-seven provinces are left as they measure. The ten sons of Haman are set by name, as the Greek gives them.

THE HARD EDGE

Purim is a book of deliverance that ends in bloodshed — the slain enemies, the ten sons of Haman hanged, the fifteen thousand. The House prints the count as it stands and does not soften it; the text is careful to say twice that the Yehudim “took no spoil” (9:15–16), for this was defence and not plunder. And both decrees — Haman’s of extermination (Add. B) and the king’s of reversal (Add. E) — are printed in full as the documents they are, the villain’s rhetoric and the vindication alike. Rule X.4.

RULE X.4

The text is rendered as it stands. The Septuagint is printed as the Septuagint — its Additions restored to their narrative places, its Elohim named where the Hebrew is silent, its distinctive readings kept in the verse and the Hebrew named only here, its omissions (as at 4:6; 9:5, 30) left as gaps in the numbering. This volume stands beside the Hebrew Ester (#35), not over it. Interpretation belongs to the introductions and the notes; it is never smuggled into the verse.