Esther3chapter 3

Haman is called an Agagite, and Mordecai is a Benjamite descended from Kish. Every Jewish hearer caught that instantly. Agag was the Amalekite king Saul son of Kish was ordered to destroy and spared, and the Amalekites were the people who attacked Israel's stragglers in the wilderness. This is not two officials clashing over protocol; it is the last round of a feud that started centuries earlier.

Bowing to a superior was ordinary Persian courtesy, not worship, so refusing it was not a religious duty as such — which is why the text ties the refusal to Mordecai telling them he was a Jew. He was taking a stand on ancestry, and Haman answered in kind by going after the whole people rather than the one man.

The lot Haman casts is called by its Persian name, pur. It was a physical object — small cubes and pyramids of inscribed clay used to pick dates and duties. One from Assyria survives with the word for 'lot' written on it, and it names the year its owner's turn came round. Haman throws it in the first month and it falls on the twelfth, handing his enemies eleven months of warning; a superstitious man takes that as the gods' timing.

The offer of ten thousand talents of silver is staggering, and hearers who knew the empire would have felt it. Herodotus lists the yearly tribute of the whole Persian empire at under fifteen thousand talents — Haman is offering roughly two-thirds of imperial revenue, presumably to be recovered from the property of the dead. The decree then travels by the royal courier system to every province in its own script and language, which is exactly how Persian administration is known to have worked.