Esther 10

1 And the king laid taxes on the kingdom, by land and by sea. 2 As for his strength and his courage, and the wealth and the glory of his kingdom — see, they stand written in the book of the kings of the Persians and the Medes, for a memorial. 3 And Mordecai was deputy to King Artaxerxes. He was a great man in the kingdom, honored by the Jews, and — well loved as he was — he told his whole nation the course these things had taken. [a]

And Mordecai said, “These things have come from God. For I remember the dream I saw about these matters — and not one word of it has failed: the little spring that became a river, and the light and the sun and the abundance of water. The river is Esther, whom the king married and made queen. The two serpents are myself and Haman. The nations are the nations that banded together to destroy the name of the Jews;

but my nation — this is Israel: those who cried out to God and were saved. The Lord has saved his people; the Lord has rescued us out of all these evils. God has done the signs and the great wonders that have never been done among the nations. For this he made two lots: one for the people of God, and one for all the nations. And the two lots came to their hour and their moment — to the day of judgment before God, and among all the nations. And God remembered his people and set his inheritance in the right.

So they will keep these days in the month of Adar, the fourteenth and the fifteenth of the month, with a gathering, with joy and with gladness before God, generation after generation, forever, among his people Israel.”

In the fourth year of the reign of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, Dositheus — who said he was a priest and a Levite — and Ptolemy his son brought the foregoing letter of Phrourai. They said it was genuine, and that Lysimachus son of Ptolemy, one of those in Jerusalem, had translated it.