Ester 8:17

8:17 Throughout every province and throughout every city where the king’s edict and his law arrived, the Jews experienced happiness and joy, banquets and holidays. Many of the resident peoples ¹  pretended ²  to be Jews, because the fear of the Jews had overcome them. ³ 

Mazmur 99:1-3

Psalm 99 ⁴ 

99:1 The Lord reigns!

The nations tremble. ⁵ 

He sits enthroned above the winged angels; ⁶ 

the earth shakes. ⁷ 

99:2 The Lord is elevated ⁸  in Zion;

he is exalted over all the nations.

99:3 Let them praise your great and awesome name!

He ⁹  is holy!

Daniel 3:29

3:29 I hereby decree ¹⁰  that any people, nation, or language group that blasphemes ¹¹  the god of Shadrach, Meshach, or Abednego will be dismembered and his home reduced to rubble! For there exists no other god who can deliver in this way.”

[8:17]  ¹ tn Heb “peoples of the land” (so NASB); NIV “people of other nationalities”; NRSV “peoples of the country.”

[8:17]  ² tn Heb “were becoming Jews”; NAB “embraced Judaism.” However, the Hitpael stem of the verb is sometimes used of a feigning action rather than a genuine one (see, e.g., 2 Sam 13:5, 6), which is the way the present translation understands the use of the word here (cf. NEB “professed themselves Jews”; NRSV “professed to be Jews”). This is the only occurrence of this verb in the Hebrew Bible, so there are no exact parallels. However, in the context of v. 17 the motivation of their conversion (Heb “the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them”) should not be overlooked. The LXX apparently understood the conversion described here to be genuine, since it adds the words “they were being circumcised and” before “they became Jews.”

[8:17]  ³ tn Heb “had fallen upon them” (so NRSV); NIV “had seized them.”

[99:1]  ⁴ sn Psalm 99. The psalmist celebrates the Lord’s just rule and recalls how he revealed himself to Israel’s leaders.

[99:1]  ⁵ tn The prefixed verbal forms in v. 1 are understood here as indicating the nations’ characteristic response to the reality of the Lord’s kingship. Another option is to take them as jussives: “let the nations tremble…let the earth shake!”

[99:1]  ⁶ sn Winged angels (Heb “cherubs”). Cherubs, as depicted in the OT, possess both human and animal (lion, ox, and eagle) characteristics (see Ezek 1:10; 10:14, 21; 41:18). They are pictured as winged creatures (Exod 25:20; 37:9; 1 Kgs 6:24-27; Ezek 10:8, 19) and serve as the very throne of God when the ark of the covenant is in view (Ps 99:1; see Num 7:89; 1 Sam 4:4; 2 Sam 6:2; 2 Kgs 19:15). The picture of the Lord seated on the cherubs suggests they might be used by him as a vehicle, a function they carry out in Ezek 1:22-28 (the “living creatures” mentioned here are identified as cherubs in Ezek 10:20). In Ps 18:10 the image of a cherub serves to personify the wind.

[99:1]  ⁷ tn The Hebrew verb נוּט (nut) occurs only here in the OT, but the meaning can be determined on the basis of the parallelism with רָגַז (ragaz, “tremble”) and evidence from the cognate languages (see H. R. Cohen, Biblical Hapax Legomena [SBLDS], 121).

[99:2]  ⁸ tn Heb “great.”

[99:3]  ⁹ tn The pronoun refers to the Lord himself (see vv. 5, 9).

[3:29]  ¹⁰ tn Aram “from me is placed an edict.”

[3:29]  ¹¹ tn Aram “speaks negligence.”