3:9a
If it pleases the king: See note on 1:19a.
decree: See note on 1:19a.
3:9b
ten thousand talents of silver: This was an enormous amount of money. A talent weighed 75 pounds (34 kilograms). So the total amount was 750,000 pounds of silver (340,000 kilograms). This equals 335 British tons, 375 American tons and 340 metric tonnes. You should choose whichever measure is normally used in your area. However the most important thing to communicate is that Haman was promising a huge amount of money. If you use footnotes in your translation, you could put this information there. The text does not explain where Haman expected to get all this money. He may have been very wealthy already, or he may have expected to get the wealth of the Jews who would be killed.
the royal treasury: This refers to the place where all the king’s wealth was stored.
those who carry it out: Literally “the doers of the work.” This may refer to:
(1) the officials who ran the government of the empire, as the same expression clearly does in 9:3. Here it would refer especially to those who looked after the king’s financial matters. The order of the Hebrew and the reference to the “royal treasury” also suggest that this is the best interpretation.
(Revised Standard Version, Good News Translation, New Century Version, Contemporary English Version, Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures, God’s Word, Revised English Bible, New Living Translation (2004), Jerusalem Bible)
(2) the men who would carry out the order to destroy all the Jews.
(Berean Standard Bible, New International Version)
It is recommended that you follow option 1. The Display follows the New Century Version.
© 2000 by SIL International®
Made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA) creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0.
All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible.
BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.