Chapter 10

This Assuerus received tribute from the whole mainland, and from the islands out at sea;

how great his reign was, you may learn from the Annals of the Medes and Persians. There, too, you will read of the high honours to which he raised Mardochaeus;

how Mardochaeus, a Jew, became next in rank to the king himself, a great name among Jewish names, a man well loved by his fellows, that sought his people’s good and brought blessings on their race. (So runs the Book of Esther in the Hebrew text, omitting certain passages which appear in the Septuagint Greek. In our Latin version, these additional passages have been collected at the end of the book, as in the translation given below. The remaining verses of this chapter, with verse 1 of chapter 11, occur at the end of the Septuagint Greek; they may, however, have been displaced, being an extract from some fuller narrative. The dream referred to is described in chapter 11.)

…All this has been God’s doing, Mardochaeus said.

I have not forgotten the dream I had, and all this was foretold in it; not a word but has come true.

I dreamt of a little spring that grew into a river, spreading out into sun and sunlight, and so went rolling on in full tide. This was Esther, the king’s bride that became his queen.

I dreamt of two dragons; of these, I was one, and Aman the other.

I dreamt of nations mustering for battle; these were the men that would have blotted out the Jewish name.

And the single nation in my dream was Israel; did not Israel cry out to the Lord, and win his protection, win deliverance from its wrongs? Wondrous proof he gave of his power, for all the world to see.

Two dooms he ordained, one for God’s people and one for the Gentiles,

and either should take effect, all the world over, after an interval of time divinely decreed;

then it was the Lord shewed he remembered his own people still, pitied his own servants still.

With eager and glad hearts all must come together and observe that time, the fourteenth and fifteenth days of Adar, as long as Israel’s race shall last.