Esther 1:3

1:3 in the third ¹  year of his reign he provided a banquet for all his officials and his servants. The army ²  of Persia and Media ³  was present, ⁴  as well as the nobles and the officials of the provinces.

Esther 5:6

5:6 While at the banquet of wine, the king said to Esther, “What is your request? It shall be given to you. What is your petition? Ask for as much as half the kingdom, ⁵  and it shall be done!”

Esther 7:7

7:7 In rage the king arose from the banquet of wine and withdrew to the palace garden. Meanwhile, Haman stood to beg Queen Esther for his life, ⁶  for he realized that the king had now determined a catastrophic end for him. ⁷ 

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¹ sn The third year of Xerxes’ reign would be ca. 483 b.c.

² tc Due to the large numbers of people implied, some scholars suggest that the original text may have read “leaders of the army” (cf. NAB “Persian and Median aristocracy”; NASB “the army officers”; NIV “the military leaders”). However, there is no textual evidence for this emendation, and the large numbers are not necessarily improbable.

³ sn Unlike the Book of Daniel, the usual order for this expression in Esther is “Persia and Media” (cf. vv. 14, 18, 19). In Daniel the order is “Media and Persia,” indicating a time in their history when Media was in the ascendancy.

⁴ sn The size of the banquet described here, the number of its invited guests, and the length of its duration, although certainly immense by any standard, are not without precedent in the ancient world. C. A. Moore documents a Persian banquet for 15,000 people and an Assyrian celebration with 69,574 guests (Esther [AB], 6).

⁵ sn As much as half the kingdom. Such a statement would no doubt have been understood for the exaggeration that it clearly was. Cf. the similar NT scene recorded in Mark 6:23, where Herod makes a similar promise to the daughter of Herodias. In that case the request was for the head of John the Baptist, which is a lot less than half the kingdom.

⁶ sn There is great irony here in that the man who set out to destroy all the Jews now finds himself begging for his own life from a Jew.

⁷ tn Heb “for he saw that calamity was determined for him from the king”; NAB “the king had decided on his doom”; NRSV “the king had determined to destroy him.”