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Esther 4 · a question people ask

"You and your father’s house will perish" (4:14). Was Mordecai threatening Esther?

In the text

The chapter gives his words and no more. He says, "Don’t think to yourself that you will escape in the king’s house any more than all the Jews" (4:13), and "if you remain silent now, then relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish" (4:14). He doesn't say how she would perish, or at whose hand, and he doesn't say he would do anything himself. He had already sent her, by Hathach, "the copy of the writing of the decree that was given out in Susa to destroy them" (4:8). The chapter doesn't tell you his tone or his thoughts, and these notes don't guess.

The verses

“He also gave him the copy of the writing of the decree that was given out in Susa to destroy them, to show it to Esther, and to declare it to her, and to urge her to go in to the king to make supplication to him, and to make request before him for her people.”
Esther 4:8 · World English Bible
“Then Mordecai asked them to return this answer to Esther: “Don’t think to yourself that you will escape in the king’s house any more than all the Jews. For if you remain silent now, then relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. Who knows if you haven’t come to the kingdom for such a time as this?””
Esther 4:13-14 · World English Bible

From Favor's study of Esther 4

Esther 4: For such a time as this

Mordecai said relief and deliverance "will come to the Jews from another place" (4:14), and never said from where; in Hebrew, deliverance comes nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. Esther answered with his own word: "if I perish, I perish" (4:16). And the man who had given her orders "did according to all that Esther had commanded him" (4:17).

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Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. Every answer cites the verses it rests on. What we believe · All Bible questions