Talmai — Addition C 7: Esther takes off her royal robes and puts on mourning, ashes on her head.
Licence: English and apparatus CC BY 4.0 (Talmai, Wroot Press); Greek from Swete, CC BY-SA. https://talmai.wrootpress.com/rights/
Canonical: https://talmai.wrootpress.com/unit/esth-plus-04.17-07/
Source edition: H. B. Swete, The Old Testament in Greek, 19.4.1a-30a

GREEK: Καὶ Ἐσθὴρ ἡ βασίλισσα κατέφυγεν ἐπὶ τὸν κύριον ἐν ἀγῶνι θανάτου κατειλημμένη, καὶ ἀφελομένη τὰ ἱμάτια τῆς δόξης αὐτῆς ἐνεδύσατο ἱμάτια στενοχωρίας καὶ πένθους, καὶ ἀντὶ τῶν ὑπερηφάνων ἡδυσμάτων σποδοῦ καὶ κοπριῶν ἔπλησεν τὴν κεφαλήν·
ENGLISH (draft-awaiting-approval): And Queen Esther fled for refuge to the Lord, seized by mortal anguish; and taking off the garments of her glory, she put on garments of distress and mourning, and instead of proud perfumes she filled her head with ashes and dung;

PARALLELS:
- [Flagged] Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 49:3 (Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 49-50) — conduit: oral. PDRE cites 'the prayer of Esther and her maidens' as the known cause of Amalek's slaughter -- a fixed tradition of Esther's penitential prayer, material wholly absent from MT and specific to Addition C.
- [Verbatim] Esther Rabbah 8:7 (Esther Rabbah) — conduit: medieval retranslation. 'ותפשט בגדי מלכותה ואת תפארתה, ותלבש שק...ותמלא אותו עפר ואפר' matches Addition C across multiple clauses — stripping royal garments, donning sackcloth/mourning, filling the head with ashes — none of it MT's.
- [Motif] Targum Sheni on Esther 5:1:1 (Targum Sheni on Esther) — conduit: Aramaic. Esther is pictured rising from dust and ashes to dress, presupposing the specific scene Addition C narrates of the queen exchanging her glory for garments of distress with ashes on her head, unattested in MT. One of the parallels the scholarly literature already records (control P05).
- [Motif] Sifrei Aggadah on Esther, Midrash Panim Acherim, Version II 5:1 (Sifrei Aggadah on Esther: Midrash Panim Acherim, Version II) — conduit: lost intermediary. Esther is 'shaken out of her ashes and stripped of the sackcloth' before being reclothed -- presupposing exactly the ash-and-mourning Esther of Addition C, a detail MT never supplies (MT puts sackcloth only on Mordecai, not Esther).