If it please the king, lot it be written that they may be destroyed, and I will pay, etc. This startling proposition, to which the king might well have demurred, for even Xerxes could scarcely have regarded such a massacre as a light matter, is followed immediately, and before the king has time to reflect, by the tempting offer of such a bribe as even a king could not view with indifference.
Xerxes had once, if we may trust Herodotus, declined to accept from a subject a gift of money equal to about four and a half million of pounds sterling (Herod; 7:28); but this was early in his reign, when his treasury was full, and he had not exhausted his resources by the Greek war.
Now, in his comparative poverty, a gift of from two to three millions had attractions for him which proved irresistible. To the hands of those that have the charge of the business. Not the business of the slaughter, but the business of receiving money for the king, i.
e. the royal treasurers. To bring it. i.e. "for them to bring it," or pay it, "into the royal treasuries." On the multiplicity of the royal treasuries see the comment on Ezra 7:20.