Day 267 (Esther 6-10) - Year 8

Tara-Leigh Cobble (0:01)

Hey Bible Readers, I'm Tara-Leigh Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap.

Today we finished our 35th book of the Bible. Yesterday when we left off, Esther had just thrown a feast for King A and Haman, and Haman's ego was soaring until he passed Mordecai who refused to bow to him. Overnight, he built a gallows to hang Mordecai on. By the way, Haman's gallows were different than what we traditionally picture. This structure was more like a giant spike to impale a person on.

While Haman's crew is working on the gallows, King A can't fall asleep. Maybe all the chainsaws outside his window were keeping him awake, or maybe it's God's providence at work. To combat his insomnia, he asks one of his staff to read him a bedtime story about everything that's happened since he took office. As they're scrolling through his time-op feed, he realizes that he never thanked that nice man who saved his life. Oopsie!

But that divine oversight from four years ago was leading up to this very moment. Just as it dawns on the king, Haman walks in bright and early to ask for permission to hang Mordecai. But before he can get the question out, King A is like, suppose I wanted to honor someone, what's the best way to do that? Haman pulls out his list of bullet points, all the ways he wants to be honored, and is expecting the king to honor him, of course.

When he finishes, King A says, awesome! Go do all those things for Mordecai.

Can you imagine how humiliating this was for Haman? To lead a parade to the center of town on behalf of Mordecai?

Then after the party, Mordecai goes back to work that day, as faithful and humble as ever. Haman is bummed, but his uber is already outside, ready to take him to the palace, so he heads back for round two of dinner with the king and queen. Once again, the king offers the queen whatever she wants, to half his kingdom, and that's when she drops the hammer. She fills him in on what Haman has done to her and her people, and he's furious, so he goes outside to cool off and count to ten. Meanwhile, Haman begs Esther, the woman whose life he threatened, to save his life. The wine is mentioned a lot in this passage, so it might be safe to assume that Haman is a little bit tipsy when he falls on the couch where Esther is sitting. And since God is sovereign even over the stumbling of a drunk fool, it happens right at the moment when the king walks back inside. He thinks it's an assault of some sort, physical or sexual or both, and his bodyguards grab Haman and take him away. Then they're like, hey, I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a giant gallows outside, freshly whittled. Should we use that? The king gives the orders and the death Haman had planned for Mordecai is doled out to him instead.

With Haman dead, Esther feels safe enough to let King A know that Mordecai is her cousin slash caretaker. Then Esther sets him over Haman's inheritance, and the king moves him into Haman's position. It all sounds like a happy ending until we remember that the clock is still ticking on the Jewish genocide in Persia's provinces, which by the way, covers the territory from India to Ethiopia. It's no small empire. We'll link to a map in the show notes in case you want to get an idea of the massive size of it. This empire included about 50 million people, which may not sound like much by today's standards, but that was nearly half the world's population at the time.

There are about nine months left before the massacre is scheduled to take place, and Esther begs the king to reverse the edict. The only problem is you can't reverse a royal edict. But the king gives Esther and Mordecai permission to write whatever they please, and they come up with a brilliant plan. Since they can't stop people from attacking the Jews, they'll give the Jews permission to fight back and plunder the goods of anyone who attacks them. The idea is that this new edict will hopefully deter most people from attacking the Jews at all. But for those who still do attack, the Jews will at least have legal grounds to fight back. As you can imagine, this is a great relief to the Jews when they get the updated memo. In fact, lots of the locals either convert to Judaism or start claiming to be Jewish just to be associated with the people they think have the upper hand. If it's the latter, nobody is endorsing their lies. Scripture just gives us this info so we can understand how this impacted the political climate at the time. When the big day comes, the Jews are attacked. So they fight back and kill 75,000 of their attackers. But did you notice what they didn't do? They didn't take the plunder. This may sound like a foolish move, but it seems more like a move of honor. Here's why. Remember how we talked about Haman being a descendant of the Amalekites, the long-standing enemies of the Israelites? When they fought against each other in 1 Samuel 15, God commanded the Israelites not to take any of the spoils of their victory, but King Saul did, and God punished him for it. So it's possible they're trying to set right what Saul had gotten so wrong in the war of their fathers 600 years ago by aiming to honor God's commands instead of taking advantage of what's available to them.