Addition A · Mordecai's dream and the eunuchs' plot · Greek before 1:1 · unit 8
The righteous nation, in fear, prepares to perish.
Rahlfs 1:1h · Swete, Esther, prologue · .txt · .json
καὶ ἐταράχθη δίκαιον πᾶν ἔθνος, φοβούμενοι τὰ ἑαυτῶν κακά, καὶ ἡτοιμάσθησαν ἀπολέσθαι·
and every righteous nation was troubled, fearing its own evils, and they prepared to perish;draft English
What the rabbinic bench shows
No witness No rabbinic or medieval Jewish text on this bench carries this plus at verbatim or motif grade. This is a finding, not an omission; see negative results for what the bench does and does not contain.
Flagged for further study (4)
The full witness text has Mordecai divide sages, students, nursing infants and hair-loosed women who 'weep and eulogize over Mordecai and over their own souls' -- the specific detail of a righteous assembly, fearing for its own life, that MT nowhere supplies, matching the plus's 'righteous nation troubled, fearing its own evils, prepared to perish'.
Show the witness text (440 words)
'ויצר לגוי הקטן מאד' matches the plus's righteous nation troubled and fearing destruction; an image with no MT counterpart.
Text not reproduced: licence not stated — research only, never published verbatim. Consult Yalkut Shimoni on Esther (Remez 1046-1061) at the reference above.
Israel is figured as a dove trapped at the dovecote between the snake within and hawk without, unable to flee because Haman has written to the four winds -- a concrete trapped-and-fearing-for-its-life image matching the plus's 'righteous nation troubled, fearing its own evils, prepared to perish.'
Show the witness text (212 words)
'ויצר לגוי הקטן מאד' (the small nation was greatly distressed) matches 'ἐταράχθη δίκαιον πᾶν ἔθνος...ἡτοιμάσθησαν ἀπολέσθαι' (the righteous nation troubled, prepared to perish), though ER's clause is shorter and omits the 'prepared to perish' element.
Show the witness text (195 words)
Hebrew retroversions
Machine-assisted reconstructions of a Hebrew the Greek might render, made under Tov's principles and used only as search queries. They are hypotheses, not evidence. 2 further candidate(s) seeded from the CATSS database are withheld under its licence.
ויחרד כל גוי צדיק ויראו את רעותיהם ויכונו למות