5
Then she called Hathach, one of the palace eunuchs appointed as her servant, and told him to go to Mordecai and get the details of what was happening.
7
Mordecai told him everything that had happened and how Haman had promised to put 375 tons of silver into the royal treasury if all the Jews were killed.
8
He gave Hathach a copy of the proclamation that had been issued in Susa, ordering the destruction of the Jews. Mordecai asked him to take it to Esther so that she might go and plead with the king and beg him to have mercy on her people. "Tell her," he said, "to remember the days when she was just an ordinary person being brought up under my care. Now, since Haman, the king's prime minister, has spoken against us and demands our death, she must pray to the Lord and then speak to the king about us. She must save us from death."
10
and Esther gave him this message to take back to Mordecai:
11
"If anyone, man or woman, goes to the inner courtyard and sees the king without being summoned, that person will be sentenced to death. Everyone in the empire knows that. Only if the king holds out his gold scepter to him can his life be spared. But it has been a month now since the king has sent for me."
12
When Mordecai received Esther's message,
13
he sent her this warning: "Esther, don't imagine that you are safer than any of the other Jews in the empire.
14
If you keep quiet at a time like this, help will come to the Jews in some other way and they will be saved, but you will die and your father's family will come to an end. Yet, who knows? Maybe it was for a time like this that you were made queen!"
15
Esther sent Mordecai this reply: