Pur
The lot Haman cast to choose the day the Jews of Persia would die — a foreign word the book stops to translate.
Pur is not a Hebrew word. It is the Akkadian puru, and Esther glosses it each time it appears — "Pur, that is, the lot" — the way a writer explains a term the reader may not know. Haman has it cast in the first month to find a day for the massacre, and it falls on the thirteenth of the twelfth: eleven months off, which is the time the rest of the book needs to turn the decree around. The object itself is known from outside the Bible. A small clay cube from ninth-century Assyria, inscribed as the puru of an official named Iahali, appears to be a lot of exactly this kind, drawn to choose whose name a year would carry. The festival that celebrates the reversal takes its name from the plural: Purim, lots.
Where it appears
See also
- Purim — The festival is named after the lot
- Casting lots — The same practice, in Hebrew
- Adar — The month the lot fell on