To confirm these days of Purim in their times appointed
The fourteenth and fifteenth of Adar:
according as Mordecai the Jew and Esther the queen had enjoined them;
in the letters written and signed by them both:
and as they had decreed for themselves, and for their seed;
see ( Esther 9:27 ) ,
the matters of their fastings and their cry;
in commemoration of their deliverance from those distresses and calamities which occasioned fastings and prayers during the time of them; and to this sense is the former Targum; though it is certain the Jews observe the thirteenth day, the day before the two days, as a fast, and which they call the fast of Esther F25, and have prayers on the festival days peculiar to them; but the sense Aben Ezra gives seems best, that as the Jews had decreed to keep the fasts, mentioned in ( Zechariah 7:5 ) , so they now decreed to rejoice in the days of Purim.