Esther6chapter 6

Esther 6:1

On that night could not the king sleep: the exact middle of the book's hundred and sixty seven verses, and the one place the narrator lets an ordinary insomnia carry the whole plot forward. No reason is given and no hand is named. The chronicles are simply sent for, and the story's entire reversal opens from a sleepless night the text never explains.

Esther 6:2-3

Bigthana and Teresh: The reading turns up the deed of 2:21-23, Mordecai's warning against the plot of Bigthana and Teresh, filed away five years earlier and never repaid. There is nothing done for him: an act of loyalty sat unrewarded in the record the whole time, waiting for the one night someone would ask the record to speak.

Esther 6:4-5

Haman is already in the outward court at dawn, come to ask the king's leave to hang Mordecai on the very gallows built the night before. The king's question, who is in the court, meets him before he can open his mouth. The chapter's whole irony sits in the timing: the man come to destroy Mordecai walks in just as the king is deciding how to reward him.

Esther 6:6

Now Haman thought in his heart, to whom would the king delight to do honour more than to myself: the question is put to him with no name attached, and his own vanity supplies the only candidate he can imagine. The narrator lets Haman answer for himself before he learns whom he has actually described.

Esther 6:7-9

Haman answers with the full ceremony of a Persian triumph: the royal robe, the king's own horse, the crown, led through the city street by one of the king's most noble princes, proclaiming the man's honor before the whole capital. Every detail he names for his own glory is measured out and handed to his enemy within the hour.

Esther 6:10-11

The king names Haman's own enemy and sends him to do even so to Mordecai the Jew, and Haman must lead the horse himself. He performs the ceremony he designed for his own glory as Mordecai's servant, arraying and proclaiming the very man he came that morning to have hanged.

Esther 6:12

Mordecai returns to the king's gate exactly where the chapter found him, unmoved by the honor as he was unmoved by the insult that started chapter five. Haman hastens home mourning, his head covered, the sign of a man already in disgrace. The two men end the scene in the postures each began it, reversed.

Esther 6:13-14

Zeresh and the wise men read the day's events as an omen rather than an accident: if Mordecai be of the seed of the Jews, before whom thou hast begun to fall, thou shalt not prevail against him, but shalt surely fall before him. Pagan counselors state the book's hidden doctrine more plainly than the narrator ever does in his own voice. Commentators who trace Haman's line back to Agag read the seed language against the old war with Amalek, a connection the words themselves carry no further than the name.