a nation bold in countenance, which shall not respect the person of the aged and shall not pity the young.

And Joshua devoted it to destruction, and all things that were in the city, man and woman, young man and old, and calf and donkey, with the edge of the sword.

And now go, and you shall strike Amalek and Hierim and all that belongs to him, and you shall not save anything of his alive, but you shall utterly destroy him. And you shall devote him and all his [to destruction], and you shall spare nothing belonging to him; and you shall slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, calf and sheep, camel and donkey.

And He brought the king of the Chaldeans against them, and killed their young men with the sword in the house of His sanctuary, and did not spare Zedekiah, and had no mercy upon their virgins, and they led away their old men; He delivered all things into their hands.

And [the message] was sent by posts throughout the kingdom of Artaxerxes, to utterly destroy the race of the Jews on the first day of the twelfth month, which is Adar, and to plunder their goods. And the following is the copy of the letter: The great King Artaxerxes writes thus to the rulers and inferior governors of a hundred and twenty-seven provinces, from India even to Ethiopia, who hold authority under [him]. Ruling over many nations, and having obtained dominion over the whole world, I was minded, (not elated by the confidence of power but ever conducting [myself] with great moderation and with gentleness) to make the lives of [my] subjects continually tranquil, desiring both to maintain the kingdom quite and orderly to [its] utmost limits, and to restore the peace desired by all men. But when I had inquired of my counselors how this should be brought to pass, Haman, who excels in sound judgment among us, and has been manifestly well inclined without wavering and with unshaken fidelity, and has obtained the second post in the kingdom, informed us that a certain ill-disposed people is mixed up with all the tribes throughout the world, opposed in their laws to every [other] nation, and continually neglecting the commands of the kings, so that the united government blamelessly administered by us is not quietly established. Having then conceived that this nation alone [of all others] is continually set in opposition to every man, introducing as a change a foreign code of laws, and injuriously plotting to accomplish the worst of evils against our interests, and against the happy establishment of the monarchy; we have accordingly appointed those who are signified to you in the letters written by Haman, who is set over [the public] affairs and is our second governor, to utterly destroy them all with their wives and children by the swords of the enemies, without pitying or sparing any, on the fourteenth day of the twelfth month (which is Adar) of the present year; that the people aforetime and now ill-disposed [to us] having been violently consigned to death in one day, may hereafter secure to us continually a well- constituted and quiet [state of] affairs.

And by you I will scatter youth and maid; and by you I will scatter man and woman.

Utterly slay old man and youth, and virgin and infants and women: but do not go near any on whom is the mark: begin at My sanctuary. So they began with the elder men who were within in the house.

SAMECH. The Lord has cut off all my strong men from the midst of me: He has summoned against me a time for crushing my choice men: the Lord has trodden a wine press for the virgin daughter of Judah: for these things I weep.

TSADE. The Lord is righteous, for I have provoked His mouth. Hear, I pray you, all people, and behold my grief: my virgins and my young men have gone into captivity.

Fire devoured their young men; and their virgins mourned not.

For death has come up through your windows, it has entered into our land, to destroy the infants outside, and the young men from the streets.

Behold, I will visit them. Their young men shall die by the sword, and their sons and their daughters shall die of famine.

Therefore deliver up their sons to famine, and gather them to the power of the sword. Let their women be childless and widows, and let their men be cut off by death, and their young men fall by the sword in war.

I sent pestilence among you by the way of Egypt, and slew your young men with the sword, together with your horses that were taken captive; and in My wrath against you I set fire to your camps; yet not even thus did you return to Me, says the Lord.

BETH. In the day of His wrath the Lord has overwhelmed [her] as in the sea, [and] not spared. He has brought down in His fury all the beautiful things of Jacob; He has brought down to the ground the strongholds of the daughter of Judah; He has profaned her kings and her princes.

PHE. The Lord has done that which He purposed; He has accomplished His word, even the things which He commanded from the ancient days; He has thrown down, and has not spared, and He has caused the enemy to rejoice over you, He has exalted the horn of him that afflicted you.

SAMECH. You has visited us in wrath, and driven us away; You have slain, You have not pitied.

And after a time there shall be in it no green thing because of [the grass] being parched. Come here, you woman that comes from a sight; for it is a people of no understanding; therefore He that made them shall have no pity upon them, and He that formed them shall have no mercy [upon them].

And I will scatter them, a man and his brother, and their fathers and their sons together. I will not have compassion, says the Lord, and I will not spare, neither will I pity [to save them] from destruction.

And after this, thus says the Lord; I will give Zedekiah king of Judah, and his servants, and the people that are left in this city from the pestilence, and from the famine, and from the sword, into the hands of their enemies that seek their lives, and they shall cut them in pieces with the edge of the sword. I will not spare them, and I will not have compassion upon them.

Therefore, [as] I live, says the Lord; surely, because you have defiled My holy things with all your abominations, I also will reject you; My eye shall not spare, and I will have no mercy.

My eye shall not spare, nor will I have any mercy, for I will recompense your way upon you, and your abominations shall be in the midst of you; and you shall know that I am the Lord.

My eye shall not spare, nor will I have any mercy: for I will recompense your ways upon you, and your abominations shall be in the midst of you; and you shall know that I am the Lord that strikes [you].

Therefore will I deal with them in wrath: My eye shall not spare, nor will I have any mercy.

And He said to the first in my hearing, Go after him into the city, and strike: and let not your eyes spare, neither have mercy.

Therefore My eye shall not spare, neither will I have any mercy: I have recompensed their ways upon their heads.

Therefore I will no longer have mercy upon the inhabitants of the land, says the Lord: but, behold, I will deliver up the men, everyone [of them,] into the hand of his neighbor, and into the hand of his king; and they shall destroy the land, and I will not rescue out of their hand.