14
So the king commanded this to be done. A decree was issued in Susa, and the ten sons of Haman were hanged.
15
The Jews who were in Susa gathered also on the fourteenth day of the month of Adar and they killed 300 men in Susa, but they laid no hands on the plunder.
16
1Now the rest of the Jews who were in the king's provinces also
2gathered to defend their lives, and got relief from their enemies and killed 75,000 of those who hated them, but they laid no hands on the plunder.
17
This was
3on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar, and on the fourteenth day they rested and made that a day of feasting and gladness.
18
But the Jews who were in Susa gathered
4on the thirteenth day and on the fourteenth, and rested
5on the fifteenth day, making that a day of feasting and gladness.
19
Therefore the Jews of the villages, who live in
6the rural towns, hold the fourteenth day of the month of Adar as a day for gladness and feasting, as
7a holiday, and
8as a day on which they send gifts of food to one another.
The Feast of Purim Inaugurated
20 And Mordecai recorded these things and sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus, both near and far,
21
obliging them to keep the fourteenth day of the month Adar and also the fifteenth day of the same, year by year,
22
as the days on which the Jews got relief from their enemies, and as the month that had been turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into
9a holiday; that they should make them days of feasting and gladness, days for sending gifts of food to one another and gifts to the poor.
23
So the Jews accepted what they had started to do, and what Mordecai had written to them.
24
For Haman the Agagite, the son of Hammedatha,
10the enemy of all the Jews,
11had plotted against the Jews to destroy them, and
12had cast Pur (that is, cast lots), to crush and to destroy them.