Thematic Bible: National deliverances

In every province and every city, wherever the king’s command and his law reached, joy and rejoicing took place among the Jews. There was a celebration and a holiday. And many of the ethnic groups of the land professed themselves to be Jews because fear of the Jews had overcome them. Verse ConceptsFearing Other PeopleRejoicing In God's Works

[They fought] on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar and rested on the fourteenth, and it became a day of feasting and rejoicing. But the Jews in Susa had assembled on the thirteenth and the fourteenth days of the month. They rested on the fifteenth day of the month, and it became a day of feasting and rejoicing. This explains why the rural Jews who live in villages observe the fourteenth day of the month of Adar as [a time of] rejoicing and feasting. It is a holiday when they send gifts to one another.