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Esther 4: Sackcloth at the king's gate, and three days of fasting in Susa

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Esther 3:15ESV

The couriers went out hurriedly by order of the king, and the decree was issued in the citadel. And the king and Haman sat down to drink, but the city of was thrown into confusion.

ESV

Mordecai also gave him a copy of the written decree issued in for their destruction, that he might show it to Esther and explain it to her and command her to go to the king to beg his favor and plead with him on behalf of her people.

ESV

“Go, gather all the Jews to be found in , and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.”

Esther 8:9ESV

The king's scribes were summoned at that time, in the third month, which is the month of Sivan, on the twenty-third day. And an edict was written, according to all that Mordecai commanded concerning the Jews, to the satraps and the governors and the officials of the provinces from to , 127 provinces, to each province in its own script and to each people in its own language, and also to the Jews in their script and their language.

Esther 3
Esther 8

Mordecai tears his clothes and walks through the city crying out, and in every province the Jews mourn and fast. He sends Esther a copy of the decree issued in Susa and charges her to go to the king, though anyone who enters the inner court unsummoned dies unless he holds out his golden sceptre. Mordecai answers her fear with the chapter's best-known line, that she may have come to the kingdom for such a time as this, and Esther asks for every Jew in Susa to fast for her for three days before she goes in.

Map of Esther 4: Sackcloth at the king's gate, and three days of fasting in Susa — 1 sites plotted

Regions on this map

Verses 8 and 16: where the decree was issued, and where the Jews gather to fast for Esther.

  • The winter capital of the Persian kings, on the plain of Elam below the Zagros, and the stage for the whole book. The ESV's “Susa the citadel” is the fortified royal quarter on its mound, set apart from the city around it. All 500 votes put it at modern Shush, in Iran's Khuzestan.

    Today: Shush, Khuzestan, Iran

Esther 4, verse by verse

  1. Esther 4:8Mordecai also gave him a copy of the written decree issued in for their destruction, that he might show it to Esther and explain it to her and command her to go to the king to beg his favor and plead with him on behalf of her people.
  2. Esther 4:16“Go, gather all the Jews to be found in , and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.”