The Second Banquet

The wine had been poured a second time, and the king asked again the question he had asked before. On this second day of feasting, Xerxes leaned toward the queen and pressed her to speak. “What is your petition, Queen Esther? It will be given to you. And what is your request? Even up to half the kingdom, it will be fulfilled.”

Esther answered the king directly and placed herself inside the danger she was describing. “If I have found favor in your eyes, O king, and if it pleases the king, grant me my life as my petition, and the lives of my people as my request. For my people and I have been sold to destruction and slaughter and annihilation.”

She did not stop there. She measured out the weight of what had been done, and she made plain that this was no small grievance to be waved away. If they had only been sold into slavery, she said, she would have kept silent, because such trouble would not have been worth disturbing the king. But this was death, and death could not be endured in silence.

The king heard the words and did not yet hold the shape of them. He demanded to know who had done this. “Who is he, and where is he, who has dared to do such a thing?”

Esther turned the moment on its hinge. She named the man seated at the same table, the guest who had come to enjoy the honor of the queen’s banquet. “The adversary and enemy,” she said, “is this wicked Haman.”

Then Haman was terrified before the king and queen. The room that had been arranged for pleasure became the place of his exposure, and there was no exit that did not run through the two people he had wronged. The king rose in his anger and left the wine and went out into the palace garden, while Haman stayed behind to beg Queen Esther for his life, for he saw that the king had already decided to destroy him.

When the king returned from the garden to the banquet hall, he found Haman fallen on the couch where Esther was reclining. What he saw looked like an assault upon the queen in the king’s own house, and his fury only deepened. “Will he even assault the queen while I am in the house?” As the words left the king’s mouth, they covered Haman’s face.

Then Harbona, one of the eunuchs attending the king, spoke of the gallows. He told the king that Haman had made a gallows fifty cubits high, standing at his own house, prepared for Mordecai—the very man whose word had once saved the king. The king said, “Hang him on it.” So they hanged Haman on the gallows he had built for Mordecai, and the fury of the king subsided.

That same day King Xerxes gave the house of Haman, the enemy of the Jews, to Queen Esther. And Mordecai came before the king, for Esther had revealed how he was related to her. The king took off the signet ring he had reclaimed from Haman and gave it to Mordecai, and Esther set Mordecai over the house of Haman.

Yet the danger had not passed with the man who devised it. Haman was dead, but the letters he had written still stood, sealed with the king’s ring and sent to every province, ordering the destruction of the Jews on a set day. Esther could not leave that decree standing. Again she fell at the king’s feet and wept and pleaded with him to avert the evil scheme Haman had devised against her people. The king extended the gold scepter to her, and she rose and stood before him.

She asked that letters be written to revoke the ones Haman had sent. “For how can I bear to see the disaster that would befall my people? How can I bear to see the destruction of my kindred?”

But the king answered with the limit that governed even his own throne. A decree written in the king’s name and sealed with the king’s ring could not be revoked. What had been set into law could not simply be unwritten. So the king gave Esther and Mordecai leave to write whatever they judged best in the king’s name and to seal it with the king’s ring, and to send it out.

The royal scribes were summoned. On the twenty-third day of the third month, the month of Sivan, they wrote to the Jews, the satraps, the governors, and the officials of the provinces from India to Cush, to each province in its own script and to each people in its own language, and to the Jews in their own script and language, all that Mordecai commanded.