Immerse: Chronicles Full Volume - Flipbook - Page 164
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IMMERSE
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CHRONICLES
7:1–8:5
So the king and Haman went to Queen Esther’s banquet. On this second
occasion, while they were drinking wine, the king again said to Esther,
“Tell me what you want, Queen Esther. What is your request? I will give
it to you, even if it is half the kingdom!”
Queen Esther replied, “If I have found favor with the king, and if it
pleases the king to grant my request, I ask that my life and the lives of
my people will be spared. For my people and I have been sold to those
who would kill, slaughter, and annihilate us. If we had merely been sold as
slaves, I could remain quiet, for that would be too trivial a matter to warrant disturbing the king.”
“Who would do such a thing?” King Xerxes demanded. “Who would be
so presumptuous as to touch you?”
Esther replied, “This wicked Haman is our adversary and our enemy.”
Haman grew pale with fright before the king and queen. Then the king
jumped to his feet in a rage and went out into the palace garden.
Haman, however, stayed behind to plead for his life with Queen Esther,
for he knew that the king intended to kill him. In despair he fell on the
couch where Queen Esther was reclining, just as the king was returning
from the palace garden.
The king exclaimed, “Will he even assault the queen right here in the
palace, before my very eyes?” And as soon as the king spoke, his attendants
covered Haman’s face, signaling his doom.
Then Harbona, one of the king’s eunuchs, said, “Haman has set up a
sharpened pole that stands seventy-five feet tall in his own courtyard. He
intended to use it to impale Mordecai, the man who saved the king from
assassination.”
“Then impale Haman on it!” the king ordered. So they impaled Haman
on the pole he had set up for Mordecai, and the king’s anger subsided.
On that same day King Xerxes gave the property of Haman, the enemy
of the Jews, to Queen Esther. Then Mordecai was brought before the
king, for Esther had told the king how they were related. The king took
off his signet r ing—which he had taken back from H
aman—and gave it
to Mordecai. And Esther appointed Mordecai to be in charge of Haman’s
property.
Then Esther went again before the king, falling down at his feet and
begging him with tears to stop the evil plot devised by Haman the Agagite
against the Jews. Again the king held out the gold scepter to Esther. So she
rose and stood before him.
Esther said, “If it please the king, and if I have found favor with him,
and if he thinks it is right, and if I am pleasing to him, let there be a decree
that reverses the orders of Haman son of Hammedatha the Agagite, who
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