The Additions to Esther are six passages that appear in the Greek Bible but not in the Hebrew one. Together they add about a hundred verses to the story of the Jewish queen of Persia. Above all, they add something the Hebrew book never mentions at all: God.
That absence is famous. The Hebrew Esther tells how a young Jewish woman saves her people from a massacre, yet it never names God, never mentions prayer and never speaks of the Law. The Greek translators noticed the silence. So they filled it with dreams, royal letters and two long prayers.
A Book Without God’s Name
In the Hebrew version, Esther hides her identity and marries the Persian king Ahasuerus. Meanwhile, the royal minister Haman plans to destroy the Jews because her cousin Mordecai refuses to bow to him. Esther risks her life, exposes the plot, and the Jews defend themselves. The feast of Purim remembers that reversal.
God works behind the scenes, if at all. Mordecai hints that help will come from another place, and that is as close as the book gets. Some rabbis later read the silence as a lesson about hidden providence. Still, many ancient readers found it troubling, and Esther is the only book of the Hebrew Bible missing among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Six Additions to Esther, A to F
Modern editions label the Greek passages with letters. Each one is placed at a precise point in the story.
- Addition A opens the book with a dream of Mordecai: two dragons roar, the nations prepare for war, and a small spring becomes a great river. Mordecai also uncovers a plot against the king.
- Addition B gives the full text of the king’s edict ordering the destruction of the Jews.
- Addition C contains the prayers of Mordecai and Esther before she goes to the king.
- Addition D retells her entrance into the throne room, where she faints and God softens the king’s heart.
- Addition E gives a second royal edict, which condemns Haman and praises the Jews.
- Addition F explains the dream of Addition A and closes with a note about the translation.
The result is a different book. The Hebrew story is a court tale about courage and timing. By contrast, the Greek story becomes a drama of divine rescue, framed from beginning to end by a revelation.
The Prayers of Mordecai and Esther
Addition C is the heart of the Additions to Esther. In the Hebrew text, Esther simply asks the Jews to fast for three days. In the Greek, both cousins pray, and their words fill a whole chapter.
Mordecai speaks first. He explains why he would not bow to Haman: not from pride, he says, but because he will not give the glory of God to a man. His refusal becomes an act of faith rather than a quarrel between officials.
Then Esther takes off her royal robes, puts on mourning clothes and covers her head with ashes. She prays to the God of Abraham as a woman alone, with no helper but him. In her words, she hates the splendor of her position and the bed of a foreign king. She has not eaten at Haman’s table, she adds, nor drunk the wine of pagan offerings.
These lines answer the most awkward questions of the Hebrew book. Did Esther keep the dietary laws? Did she marry a gentile willingly? The Greek text says she stayed faithful in her heart. You can read her prayer in Esther 14 in the NRSV Updated Edition, which follows the numbering of the Latin Bible.
Esther Before the King
Addition D turns one verse of the Hebrew into a scene of high drama. Esther enters the inner court in full splendor, yet her heart is frozen with fear. The king looks up in fierce anger, and she collapses on the shoulder of her maid.
At that moment, the text says, God changed the spirit of the king to gentleness. He leaps from his throne, takes her in his arms and comforts her. Therefore the turning point of the story no longer depends on luck or charm. Instead, it becomes a direct act of God.
The Royal Letters in Greek Style
Additions B and E read very differently from the prayers. They are written in polished, formal Greek, full of long periods and official phrases. Most scholars think they were composed in Greek from the start, perhaps by a writer who knew the style of the Ptolemaic chancery in Egypt.
The first letter presents the Jews as a hostile people who follow strange laws. The second letter reverses it completely. Now the king calls Haman a Macedonian traitor and describes the Jews as children of the living God. In this way, the Additions to Esther let a pagan monarch confess the God that the Hebrew book never names.
These edicts also gave the story a feel of real history. Readers in Alexandria could imagine official documents on file in the Persian archives. The Letter of Aristeas uses the same device when it quotes royal letters about the translation of the Law.
Mordecai’s Dream and Its Meaning
The story ends where it began. In Addition F, Mordecai remembers his dream and finally understands it. The two dragons were himself and Haman. The small spring that became a river was Esther, whom the king married and made queen.
Framing a story with a dream and its interpretation was a familiar Jewish technique. The book of Daniel works the same way, and so do many apocalyptic writings. Moreover, the frame turns the whole plot into the fulfillment of a divine plan. Purim becomes a feast of God’s faithfulness, not just a celebration of a lucky escape.
Who Wrote the Additions to Esther?
The Greek book ends with an unusual note, called a colophon. It says that in the fourth year of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, a priest named Dositheus and his son brought the letter about Purim to Egypt. It names the translator as Lysimachus, son of Ptolemy, a resident of Jerusalem.
Scholars usually date that note to about 114 BC, although 78 BC is also possible. If it is accurate, a Jerusalem translator produced the Greek Esther, and Egyptian Jews received it as a guide to the new feast. Some additions may come from a Hebrew or Aramaic source. Others, like the royal letters, were clearly written in Greek.
There is also a second Greek version, known as the Alpha Text. It is shorter and differs in many details, and some scholars think it reflects an older Hebrew form of the story. Josephus, writing in the first century AD, paraphrases the prayers and the letters in his Jewish Antiquities, so he knew a Greek Esther with additions.
How Jerome Moved the Additions to Esther
The strange layout of Esther in many Catholic Bibles comes from Jerome. Around AD 400 he translated the book from Hebrew for the Latin Vulgate. However, he found the Greek passages missing from his source, so he collected them at the end, marked with a critical sign.
That decision cut the additions away from their places in the story. In the Vulgate they appear as chapters 10:4 to 16:24, in an order that no longer makes sense. For example, the interpretation of the dream comes before the dream itself. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Book of Esther explains this numbering and defends the additions as scripture.
Additions to Esther and the Christian Canon
Churches that used the Greek Bible read Esther with its additions from the start. The Orthodox churches still do. In 1546 the Council of Trent declared the whole book canonical for Catholics, including every part of it.
The Reformers took a different path. They followed the Hebrew text and moved the Greek passages into a separate section, as with the Story of Susanna and the other additions to Daniel. The King James Bible of 1611 printed them among the Apocrypha as The Rest of Esther. This blog traces that wider decision in why the apocryphal books were removed from the Bible.
As a result, readers today meet three different Esthers. Jews and most Protestants read the short Hebrew book. Catholics read the Greek additions at the end, while many modern study Bibles print them in their original places.
Esther, Judith and the Prayer of Manasseh
The prayer of Esther belongs to a family of Jewish prayers from the same period. Like the heroine of Judith in the Apocrypha, Esther humbles herself with ashes before she acts. Both women pray as the weak before the strong.
The Prayer of Manasseh offers another example. It is also a Greek prayer placed in the mouth of a biblical figure, at the point where the older text says only that he prayed. Such prayers show how Jewish writers of the Second Temple era read scripture. Where the story fell silent, they gave its characters a voice.
The Wikipedia article on the Additions to Esther summarizes the textual evidence and the main debates about their origin.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the Additions to Esther in the Protestant Bible? Not in the main Old Testament. Protestant Bibles that include the Apocrypha print them there, often under the title The Rest of Esther.
Why does the Hebrew Esther never mention God? Nobody knows for sure. Some scholars think the book was written as a secular court tale for Purim, while others see the silence as a deliberate picture of hidden providence.
Where is the prayer of Esther? It is part of Addition C. In Catholic Bibles that follow the Vulgate numbering, it appears in Esther 14.
What language were the additions written in? Some may come from a Hebrew or Aramaic source. The two royal letters, however, were almost certainly composed in Greek.
Additions to Esther: What Remains
What remains of the Additions to Esther is a second reading of a familiar story. The Hebrew book trusts its readers to find God between the lines, while the Greek book writes him into every page.
Both versions still stand side by side in the Christian Bible. Read together, they show how a community wrestled with a sacred text that seemed to leave its most important character offstage.
Check out the author’s book here: The Apocrypha.
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