¹tn Heb “house” (also in vv. 2, 7).
²sn As in 7:4 Esther avoids implicating the king in this plot. Instead the plan to destroy the Jews is placed entirely at Haman’s feet.
³tn Heb “Esther.” The pronoun (“she”) was used in the translation for stylistic reasons. A repetition of the proper name would appear redundant here in terms of contemporary English style.
⁴tc The LXX does not include the expression “the Agagite.”
⁵tn Heb “my kindred.”
⁶tn Heb “sent forth his hand.” Cf. 9:2.
⁷tn Heb “in that time.”
⁸sn Cf. 3:12. Two months and ten days have passed since Haman’s edict to wipe out the Jews.
⁹tn Heb “it was written.”
¹⁰tn Heb “Cush,” referring to the region of the upper Nile in Africa.
¹¹tn Heb “He”; the referent (Mordecai) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
¹²tn Heb “children and women.”
¹³tn Heb “this.”
¹⁴tn Heb “making haste and hurrying.”
¹⁵tn Heb “shouted and rejoiced.” The expression is a hendiadys.
¹⁶tn Heb “light and gladness and joy and honor.” The translation understands the four terms to be a double hendiadys.
¹⁷tn Heb “peoples of the land.”
¹⁸tn Heb “were becoming Jews.” But the Hitpael stem of the verb is sometimes used of a feigning action rather than a genuine one (see, e.g., 2 Sam 13:5, 6), which is the way the translation understands the use of the word here (cf. NEB “professed themselves Jews”). This is the only occurrence of this verb in the Hebrew Bible, so there are no exact parallels to examine. However, in the context of v. 17 the motivation of their conversion (Heb “the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them”) should not be overlooked. The LXX apparently understood the conversion described here to be genuine, since it adds the words “they were being circumcised and” before “they became Jews.”
¹⁹tn Heb “had fallen upon them.”