³ In every province, wherever the king’s command and his decree came, there was great mourning among the Jews, with fasting and weeping and lamenting, and most of them lay in sackcloth and ashes.^(A)

⁸ Job^[a] took a potsherd with which to scrape himself and sat among the ashes.^(A)

⁵ “Say to all the people of the land and the priests: When you fasted and lamented in the fifth month and in the seventh for these seventy years, was it for me that you fasted?^(A)