The Night the King Could Not Sleep

That night, the king could not sleep. He ordered the Book of Records, the chronicles, to be brought in and read to him.

The reading reached the account of how Mordecai had exposed the two royal eunuchs, Bigthana and Teresh, guards of the threshold who had plotted to lay hands on King Xerxes. Their scheme had been uncovered. Their treachery had been stopped. And the man who had reported it was Mordecai.

The king listened, then asked a question. “What honor or dignity has been bestowed on Mordecai for this?”

The king’s attendants answered plainly. “Nothing has been done for him.”

Nothing. The service had been recorded and left unrewarded, buried in a book until a sleepless night brought it back into the light.

Just then the matter turned on the smallest hinge of timing. The king wanted counsel, and he asked, “Who is in the court?”

It happened that Haman had entered the outer court of the palace. He had come with a purpose of his own, arriving early to speak to the king about hanging Mordecai on the gallows he had prepared. The wood was already standing, fifty cubits high, waiting for the man Haman despised. He had come to ask for that death.

So the king’s servants told him, “Haman is there, standing in the court.”

“Have him enter,” the king said.

Haman came in. Before he could speak a word of his own errand, the king spoke first. “What should be done for the man the king wishes to honor?”

The question hung in the air, and Haman turned it over in his mind. He reasoned to himself, “Whom would the king wish to honor more than me?” Certain the honor could be meant for no one else, he answered with a vision worthy of his own hopes.

“For the man the king wishes to honor,” Haman said, “let them bring a royal robe that the king himself has worn and a horse on which the king himself has ridden—one with a royal crest placed on its head. Let the robe and the horse be entrusted to one of the king’s most noble princes. Let them array the man the king wishes to honor and parade him on horseback through the city square, proclaiming before him, ‘This is what is done for the man the king wishes to honor!’”

He had painted the picture in full, robe and horse and crown and a herald’s cry, and he had painted himself into the center of it.

Then the king spoke again, and every word landed differently than Haman had imagined. “Hurry,” the king said, “and take the robe and the horse, as you have suggested, and do this for Mordecai the Jew, who is sitting at the king’s gate. Do not neglect anything you have proposed.”

Mordecai the Jew. The very man Haman had come to destroy, the man he had built a gallows for, was now the man he must honor with his own hands.

So Haman took the robe and the horse. He arrayed Mordecai. He led him on horseback through the city square, and he himself called out before him the words he had chosen for his own glory: “This is what is done for the man the king wishes to honor!”

Through the streets they went, the enemy leading the one he hated, proclaiming honor over him step after step for the whole city to see.

When it was finished, Mordecai returned to the king’s gate. But Haman rushed to his own house, grieving, with his head covered. He told his wife Zeresh and all his friends everything that had happened to him. And those who had counseled him before, his wise men and his wife, gave him no comfort now. They said to him, “Since Mordecai, before whom your downfall has begun, is Jewish, you will not prevail against him but will surely fall before him.”

The words were still on their lips when the king’s eunuchs arrived. They had come in haste, and they hurried Haman away to the banquet Esther had prepared.