When I read, I’m bound to have questions about some of the things that I’m reading. That’s cool. I like questions – especially if I can find the answers to them. Reading the Bible is no different than another book. Sometimes I’m able to find the answers to those questions. Other times, I’m not.
Esther is about a Jewish orphan named Esther and her cousin Mordecai, who adopts her. Esther ends up marrying King Xerxes, the king of Persia. Mordecai works in some capacity in the palace and he refuses to bow to Haman, the king’s right hand man. This ticks Haman off and he wants to get even. He learns that Mordecai is Jewish and decides that just killing the guy isn’t enough. He has to wipe out the entire race. So he talks the king into it and donates 375 tons of silver to the cause.
Mordecai finds out and gets word to Esther inside the palace. Esther says that she can’t go to the king uninvited. She could be killed. Mordecai says, “Perhaps you were made queen for such a time as this.” And Esther says, “Fine. Get everybody together and fast for three days. We’ll do that here. And then I’ll go to see the king. If I perish, I perish.”
So everybody fasts and then Esther goes to see Xerxes uninvited. Fortunately, he extends his scepter to her and she doesn’t die. She invites him and Haman to a dinner party. Of course, this makes Haman as giddy as a school girl because he’s being treated well by the king and the queen. It made his day.
But running into Mordecai on his way home just wipes the smile off his face, because Mordecai doesn’t bow to him like everybody else does.
When Haman gets home, he gets together with his wife, Zeresh, and his BFFs and talks about how awesome he is. Then he complains about Mordecai not showing him the respect that he’s due. His wife comes up with what he thinks is a genius idea: build a gallows 75 feet high and have Mordecai hanged. (Now, depending on the version of the Bible you’re reading, it translates the Hebrew word as gallows or as sharpened stick.) Haman thinks this is an awesome idea, so he tells his people to do it.
Not too long after this decision, Haman goes to the palace to ask the king to give him permission to hang Mordecai. Fortunately for Mordecai, Xerxes couldn’t sleep and had the history of his reign read to him to make him fall asleep. The part that was read to him was about Mordecai uncovering an assassination plot. So the king wants to honor Mordecai. Haman arrives just in time to tell the king what he thinks needs to be done for someone like that (because he thinks the king is talking about him). Talk about a rude awakening when he hears that he’s supposed to treat his mortal enemy like that!
Anyway, Haman ends up swinging on the gallows that he built for Mordecai. And all his sons are killed (all 10 of them!). And ultimately, Mordecai ends up as Xerxes’ right hand man.
Crazy story, right. There are tons of details that I could focus on and talk about. And there are tons of questions that I have about the story that won’t get answered. But the one that my brain seems fixated on is did Haman just have the materials laying around that it made it just that easy to set up a gallows over night? And not just a regular-sized gallows – a 75 foot tall one. That’s 3/4 the length of a football field. That’s a 9 story building, give or take a few feet. Obviously he was a rich guy, considering the amount of silver he was putting into his extermination plot. So he must have had the man power and the resources to commission a project like that.
But that’s still quite a bit of work that has to be put into building something like that. I’m guessing that it didn’t really have to be built to code or anything. It just had to be sturdy enough to hang someone. Still, he had to either have the guys who knew how to do that or he knew how to find them. Being a part of the king’s inner circle, I imagine he had connections.
Thinking about it as a sharpened pole, though, my mind pictures this guy with a knife sharpening the end of a really long pole. Did they have a telephone pole-sized log set aside for this at the home improvement store and people just checked it out when they wanted to impale someone? Or did they just have a small stock at the palace that Haman borrowed it from? Or was it something that was in the family passed down from father to son? And was it just a really tall pole? Was it a pole at the top of a really tall scaffold? And they had to be able to get the person to be killed over the top of the pole.
Gruesome, I know. But those are quite practical questions, if you think about it. Or don’t.
But I also wonder what Esther served at those two dinners that she hosted. Pizza? Pasta? Baklava? A whole cow? Did she whip it up herself or just get her staff to do it? Hopefully, she had eaten something else in between issuing the invitation and the dinner. That way, she could break her fast in private and not pig out in front of the king and Haman. I know I’m super hungry after not having eaten for like 5 hours, much less 3 days. Or was it okay back then for a queen to pig out?
Lots of questions. I enjoy thinking them and pondering the possibilities.