The second banquet
1So the king and Haman came to drink with Queen Esther. 2On this second day too, at the wine banquet, the king said to Esther, “What is your petition, Queen Esther? It will be granted you. What is your request? Up to half the kingdom, and it will be done.” 3Queen Esther answered: “If I have found favor in your eyes, O king, and if it pleases the king, let my life be granted me as my petition, and my people as my request. 4For we have been sold — I and my people — to be destroyed, killed and annihilated. Had we merely been sold as slaves, men and women alike, I would have kept silent; but the foe is not worth the damage this would do the king.” 5King Ahasuerus spoke, and he said to Queen Esther, “Who is he, and where is he, the man whose heart has emboldened him to do such a thing?” 6Esther said, “A man who is foe and enemy — this wicked Haman!” And Haman was terrified before the king and the queen. 7The king rose in his fury from the wine banquet and went out into the palace garden, while Haman stayed behind to beg Queen Esther for his life, for he saw that the king had already decided his ruin. 8When the king came back from the palace garden into the hall of the wine banquet, Haman was sprawled on the couch where Esther was. The king said, “Will he even force the queen, here in the house, with me present?” The word had barely left the king’s mouth when they covered Haman’s face. 9Then Harbona, one of the eunuchs attending the king, said, “There is also the pole, fifty cubits high, that Haman made for Mordecai — the man who spoke up for the king’s good. It is standing at Haman’s house.” The king said, “Hang him on it.” 10So they hanged Haman on the pole he had set up for Mordecai, and the king’s fury subsided.
