Expansions to a canonical book · Greek, 2nd-1st century BC
Additions to Esther
The book of Esther never once says the name of God, so someone wrote the prayers back in.
- 7Chapters
- 105Verses
- c. 200-100 BCEWritten
Original language: Greek (mostly composed, not translated)
King James Version Apocrypha (1769 standardized text) · public domain
Read Additions to Esther
The numbering starts at chapter 10 because these chapters continue straight on from the canonical book — the King James kept the running numbers.
King James Version + Apocrypha (standardized 1769 text), eBible.org USFX edition of the Crosswire/eBible KJV — Public Domain — The chapters are numbered 10-16 and the first begins at verse 4, because in the KJV they continue straight on from canonical Esther 10:3.
Featured studies on this book
— the deep dives, each its own page
Plain answers first
What this book is
This is not a separate story. It is six large passages added to the book of Esther when Esther was translated into Greek. In Greek Bibles they sit inside the book where they belong: Mordecai's dream at the very start, the two royal decrees quoted word for word, the prayers of Mordecai and Esther, Esther's terrifying walk into the throne room, and the interpretation of the dream at the end.
They look strange in an English Bible because of Jerome. Making the Latin Bible, he found these passages in the Greek but not in the Hebrew, so he cut them out and stacked them at the end of Esther with a note explaining what he had done. English Bibles inherited that arrangement. It is why these chapters are numbered 10 through 16, why the first one starts partway through a chapter, and why they read badly out of order.
What they add is God. The Hebrew Esther is famous as the one book of the Hebrew Bible that never mentions God, never mentions prayer, never mentions the law: a book where the rescue is real and the hand behind it is never named. The additions put all of it back. Mordecai and Esther pray at length, Esther says she hates the crown she wears and has never eaten at Haman's table, and God is thanked outright for the deliverance.
Dating is hedged. A note attached to the Greek Esther (11:1 in this numbering) says the book was brought to Egypt in the fourth year of a king Ptolemy and queen Cleopatra, which most scholars read as around 114 BC, though other dates are argued. The additions themselves were probably composed across the second and first centuries BC, some written in Greek and some translated from a Semitic original.
Why a student of the 66 should still open it
Why read it: and how
They are the earliest surviving commentary on Esther: the first readers telling us what they thought was missing and what they thought the book meant. That is genuinely useful, because it shows an ancient Jewish community reading Esther's silence about God much the way many Christians read it, as God working unnamed, and then deciding to say so out loud. Esther's prayer in chapter 14 is one of the strongest pieces of prayer in Greek Jewish literature, and her confession that she loathes the sign of her high estate rewards sitting with. The two decrees also show how anti-Jewish policy was argued and answered in the Greek-speaking world. No New Testament writer quotes the additions.
Read the Hebrew Esther first, whole, and feel the silence. Then read these chapters in their proper places rather than in printed order: chapter 11 and the opening of 12 belong before Esther 1; 13:1-7 after Esther 3:13; 13:8 through chapter 14 after Esther 4:17; chapter 15 next; chapter 16 after Esther 8:12; and 10:4 to 11:1 at the very end. As you go, ask what the additions gain and what they cost: a book that hid God's hand now says his name on every page.
The canon question, honestly
Why it stands outside the 66
The Hebrew Esther that the Jewish community received as Scripture does not contain these passages, and the Hebrew canon is the canon Protestants kept. Jerome saw the difference plainly and separated them; the Reformers, following him, printed them among the books read for edification rather than for doctrine, and that is where the King James put them in 1611. Trent declared the Greek Esther, additions and all, canonical for Roman Catholics in 1546. Notice what the disagreement is not about: nobody disputes Esther itself. The only question is whether these six later expansions come with it.
Doors into the text
Key moments
Mordecai reads his own vision: the little spring that became a river was Esther.
Two dragons, a cry, and a flood: the Greek Esther's true opening scene.
Haman's death warrant quoted in full, then Mordecai on his face before God.
She strips off the royal robes, covers herself in ashes, and says she hates the crown.
She faints at the sight of the king, and his face turns from fury to gentleness.
The king reverses himself in writing and names Haman a schemer and a traitor.
Plainly told
The story it tells
A dream to open the book
Mordecai dreams of two great dragons preparing to fight, threatening the whole world with destruction, until a tiny spring bursts out and grows into a great river, and light and the sun rise over it. He wakes troubled, turning the dream over all day trying to understand it.
The decree, in full
Where the Hebrew book only summarizes the king's order to destroy the Jews, this addition supplies the entire document: the paranoid, sweeping language of an empire turning on a whole people.
Two people pray
Before Esther risks her life by approaching the king unsummoned, both she and Mordecai pray at length: Mordecai for the nation, Esther for herself, asking not only for deliverance but for the eloquence and favor she will need in the moment ahead.
The approach to the throne, dramatized
Esther's walk into the king's presence (a single tense verse in the Hebrew book) becomes a full scene: she nearly faints from fear, and it is God, this version says outright, who turns the king's anger into gentleness.
The reversal, in full
As with the first decree, the king's second order (reversing the first and letting the Jews defend themselves) is given complete rather than summarized.
The dream explained
The book closes by unlocking Mordecai's opening dream: the two dragons are Mordecai and Haman, the spring that becomes a river is Esther, and the gathered nations are those who conspired against the Jews and were answered when Israel cried out to God.
Dates hedged where scholarship hedges
Where it sits in history
- 2nd–1st century BC
The broad scholarly range for when the six additions were composed: most plausibly Hellenistic-era Alexandrian Judaism, attached to the Greek text of Esther as it took final shape.
- Disputed date (colophon)
A note appended to the Greek text names a translator, Lysimachus of Jerusalem, and dates the translation to a Ptolemaic regnal year, but which Ptolemy is meant, and therefore the exact year (commonly reckoned near 114 BC on one reading), is debated among scholars.
- c. AD 405
Jerome translates the Hebrew Esther “with complete accuracy,” then appends the Greek material separately, marking it with an obelus, a dagger-shaped mark he calls, in his own word, “a spit,” to flag it as absent from the Hebrew.
- 1546
The Council of Trent affirms the additions as canonical, folded into the single book of Esther rather than listed apart.
The disagreement is old: here it is plainly
Where the traditions stand
The six additions were never part of the Hebrew Esther, and no Hebrew original for them has ever surfaced or is attested by any ancient witness: unlike most of the Apocrypha, which translate a lost Hebrew or Aramaic source, these appear to have been composed directly in Greek.
Jerome kept the two bodies of text visibly distinct rather than blending them into one continuous story: he translated the Hebrew book straight through, then appended the Greek additions afterward under his obelus mark, saying plainly that what came before was accurate to the Hebrew and what followed was “written in the common edition, in which are contained the language and letters of the Greeks.”
The Reformers followed Jerome's line and set the additions among the apocrypha: the King James Version prints them, out of story order, under the heading “The Rest of the Chapters of the Book of Esther.” The Council of Trent in 1546 took the opposite path and folded the additions into a single canonical book of Esther. Eastern Orthodox churches never treated this as a live question in the same way, since their Old Testament is the Greek text and the additions were simply part of Esther from the start.
One fact makes the stakes of this disagreement unusually visible: the Hebrew Book of Esther famously never mentions God's name, not once. The Greek additions supply that silence: prayers, direct address to God, and an explicit divine hand behind the king's change of heart. So the canon question here is also, in a real sense, a question about how much of the book's theology a reader receives as Scripture.
| Tradition | Where this book stands |
|---|---|
| jewish | not canonical (Hebrew Esther is canonical; Greek additions are not) |
| anglican | apocryphal |
| catholic | canonical (as part of Esther; deuterocanonical portions) |
| protestant | non-canonical; included in Apocrypha |
| eastern orthodox | canonical |
| oriental orthodox | canonical |
2 threads into the 66
Its connections into Scripture
Mordecai's prayer of covenant appeal and Esther's prayer of self-abasement and fasting (Additions to Esther, Addition C) parallel Daniel 9's post-exilic confessional prayer in vocabulary and structure: invocation of the covenant-keeping God, recital of sin, appeal to God's mercy, petition for deliverance. Both belong to the Second Temple post-exilic prayer tradition.
Esther going before the king at risk of her life to intercede for her people (dramatically expanded in Addition D, where she faints and God turns the king's heart) became a typological pattern in Christian tradition for the church and for Mary as intercessors. The theology of weak-but-faithful intercession against imperial genocide echoes into Mary's Magnificat.
Reception history, never our confession
What the church has made of it
Reading Esther in Greek from very early on, the Eastern church simply absorbed the additions as part of the book's ordinary text and liturgical use: there was no separate controversy to have.
In the Latin West, once Jerome had pulled the additions apart from the Hebrew narrative, Esther became a natural test case in the wider canon debate precisely because the theological difference the additions make (a book with God named on every page, instead of not at all) is so visible.
Printed in the KJV Apocrypha out of their original narrative order (following Jerome's own arrangement), the additions read confusingly to a reader who does not already know where each one belongs inside the Hebrew story, which is part of why they are best read alongside the Hebrew Esther, addition by addition, rather than as their own continuous book.
The voices
What the teachers have said
“Those things which are found in the Hebrew I have expressed with complete accuracy. And these things which follow I have found written in the common edition, in which are contained the language and letters of the Greeks... which, according to our custom, we annotate with an obelus, that is, a spit.”
Every claim above rests on these
Where this comes from
- Bruce M. Metzger, An Introduction to the Apocrypha (1957)
- Carey A. Moore, Daniel, Esther and Jeremiah: The Additions (Anchor Bible, 1977)
- David A. deSilva, Introducing the Apocrypha (2nd ed., 2018)
- R. H. Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, vol. 1 (1913)
- The Greek Esther itself (KJV Apocrypha)