What Does Esther 7:4 Mean in the King James?
For we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and to perish. But if we had been sold for bondmen and bondwomen, I had held my tongue, although the enemy could not countervail the king’s damage.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The same word “sold” covers bondage and annihilation, but the verse refuses to let those outcomes collapse into one.
THE MEANING
You hear Esther name the threat as a sale with an outcome: destruction, killing, and the loss of her people, herself included. She says she would have kept silent if the sale meant slavery, but now makes the king’s loss part of her appeal against the adversary.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the assumption that a sale can be weighed only in money: here, the sale’s intended outcome is the destruction of a whole people.
THE ROOT
לְאַבֵּד
le'abbed
GROWS FROM
אבד
avad
To perish or be lost; in the form used here, to cause someone to perish.
“perish” in this verse is le'abbed. The final verb belongs to a root that holds perishing and being lost together. Following “destroyed” and “slain,” it names the threatened loss of a whole people, not just one person’s death.
ALSO GROWS
avad: To perish; to be lost.
אָבַד
The root’s basic verb joins death with loss, giving the final threat its full weight.
avedah: A lost thing; something missing.
אֲבֵדָה
This branch makes the root’s language of loss concrete: the threat reaches beyond injury to the disappearance of a people.
avaddon: Destruction; ruin.
אֲבַדּוֹן
This noun carries the root’s movement from being lost to destruction, echoing the sequence named in the verse.
נִמְכַּרְנוּ
nimkarnu
GROWS FROM
מכר
makhar
To sell or transfer for a price; in the form here, to be sold.
The verb appears again when Esther names the hypothetical alternative of being sold into slavery. The same sale frames both outcomes, while the verse draws a sharp line between bondage and a threat to destroy the people.
ALSO GROWS
mekhirah: A sale; selling.
מְכִירָה
This noun keeps the commercial frame visible: people are being treated as transferable property.
mimkar: A sale; something sold.
מִמְכָּר
The related noun echoes the repeated verb and makes the verse’s language of human commodification harder to miss.
הַצָּר
ha-tsar
GROWS FROM
צרר
tsarar
To bind, press, or cause distress.
The word translated “enemy” is צָר (tsar), from a root associated with pressing and distress. The adversary is named through the pressure brought against the people, while the verse exposes how narrow their choices have become.
ALSO GROWS
tsar: Narrow or tight; an adversary.
צַר
The word’s sense of narrowing makes the danger more than opposition: it is pressure closing in around the people.
tsarah: Distress; trouble.
צָרָה
This branch names the distress that Esther brings before the king.
THE PATTERN
When lives are treated as an acceptable cost, naming the threatened outcome makes power face what its calculation contains.
Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction.For if I be an offender, or have committed any thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die: but if there be none of these things whereof these accuse me, no man may deliver me unto them. I appeal unto Cæsar.THE THREAD
And the letters were sent by posts into all the king’s provinces, to destroy, to kill, and to cause to perish, all Jews, both young and old, little children and women, in one day, even upon the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month Adar, and to take the spoil of them for a prey.Esther 3:13 uses the same Hebrew root אבד (avad) in the closing phrase translated “to cause to perish.” Its sequence of destroying, killing, and causing a people to perish makes the final word name the loss of the whole community.
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