Esther1chapter 1

Persia ruled the largest empire the world had yet seen — from India to the edge of Africa, cut into provinces under governors called satraps. The king kept four capitals and moved between them with the seasons. Susa was the winter residence, and the palace sat on a raised, walled citadel above the city. French excavators dug that palace out in the 1880s and found glazed brick panels of the royal guard and a great columned audience hall; the panels are in the Louvre today.

A six-month display of wealth was not a party in our sense. It was statecraft. Herodotus records that Xerxes summoned the nobles and commanders of the empire to Susa in exactly these years to plan the invasion of Greece, and a war of that size had to be sold to the men who would pay for it and fight it. The 180 days of showing off the treasury, followed by a seven-day open feast for everyone in the citadel, is what a war council looked like from the outside.

The details of the feast are Persian to the bone. Guests reclined on gold and silver couches on a pavement of coloured stone, and no two drinking cups matched — a deliberate boast that the treasury never repeated itself. The one custom the text singles out is the rule that no one was forced to drink, which reverses the usual Persian practice; Herodotus says the Persians drank hard and made their biggest decisions drunk.

The seven officials who 'saw the king's face' were not invented for the story. Persian government really did reserve the right of direct access to the heads of seven noble houses, a privilege dating from the coup that put Darius on the throne. And the ruling that a royal decree, once sealed, could not be taken back is a feature of Persian law that shows up again in Daniel — a system built to make the king look unchangeable, which ends up trapping him.