Esther 8:5

When this passage opens, Haman has already been hanged on the gallows he built for Mordecai (Esther 7:10). Yet the letters he sent out remain in force. They were written in the name of King Ahasuerus and sealed with his ring (Esther 3:12), and they ordered that all the Jews in the empire be destroyed on a single appointed day (Esther 3:13). The empire was vast, reaching from India to Ethiopia across 127 provinces (Esther 1:1), and the order had gone to every one of them. Ahasuerus is usually identified with Xerxes I, who reigned from 486 to 465 BC.

Persian law held that a royal decree, once written and sealed, could never be altered, as the book has already shown (Esther 1:19). Even the king was bound by his own sealed word. Esther’s courage at the banquets of Esther 5 and Esther 7 had exposed the man and brought him down, and the order to kill her people was still waiting for its day. Her mission was the deliverance of her people, so she goes back to the king a second time, now to deal with the decree itself.

“And Esther spake yet again before the king.” Having risked her life once to come before him and expose Haman, she returns to finish what she began. This time she falls down at his feet. A queen lying at the king’s feet is a picture of urgent, humble supplication, an appeal to his compassion as well as his power. She “besought him with tears”. The verb is chânan, which at root means to bend or stoop in kindness to someone lower, and from that it comes to mean to implore, to seek someone’s favour by petition. Her tears show how deeply she feels for her people and how much rests on this moment.

She asks him “to put away the mischief of Haman the Agagite, and his device that he had devised against the Jews.” “Mischief” is raʻ, the common Hebrew word for evil, covering both wickedness and the calamity it brings. Here it is the evil Haman set in motion and the disaster about to fall on the Jews. “Device” is machăshâbâh, a contrivance, intention or plan, from the verb chāshab, to think. Haman’s scheme was thought out and deliberate, and the same word stands behind “the letters devised by Haman” in verse 5. Esther understood that removing the man was half the work. The plan he had put in place was still alive, and it had to be undone.

Moses pleaded with God for Israel (Exodus 32:11–14), and Nehemiah grieved and prayed for Jerusalem (Nehemiah 1:4–11). Esther stands with them as one who pleads for her people. Hers is a petition to an earthly king, and it shows the same love that keeps pleading while the people are still in danger.

“Then the king held out the golden sceptre toward Esther.” The law of the court was that anyone who came to the king in the inner court uncalled would die, unless the king held out the golden sceptre to them (Esther 4:11). That was the risk Esther had accepted when she said, “if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16), and the first time she came, the king held out the sceptre and spared her (Esther 5:2). Whether she came uncalled this time the verse leaves unsaid, but the same gesture tells her again that she has his favour and may rise and speak.

The sceptre, sharbîyṭ, is the rod of empire, the staff that marks the king’s rule, and this one was made of gold, zâhâb. To hold it out toward someone was to grant life and a hearing. “Held out” is yâshaṭ, to extend. Then “Esther arose, and stood before the king”. She rises, qûwm, from the floor where she had fallen, and stands, ʻâmad, before him, ready to make her request. “Before the king” is literally before his face, pânîym, the word for face that also means presence.

Esther came to an earthly throne trusting in a king’s goodwill. We are bidden to “come boldly unto the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:16), where mercy is promised to all who come through Christ.

Esther opens with four conditions: “If it please the king, and if I have found favour in his sight, and the thing seem right before the king, and I be pleasing in his eyes”. Each one rests her request on the king. “Favour” is chên, graciousness, favour or charm, and she leans wholly on his goodwill toward her. “The thing seem right” appeals to his sense of what is just, so that her plea becomes something he can see to be right as well as something she wants. “I be pleasing in his eyes” appeals to his affection for her as his queen. Under a king whose word decided life and death, this was the wise way to ask, and Esther is as shrewd as she is humble.

Then comes the request itself: “let it be written to reverse the letters devised by Haman the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, which he wrote to destroy the Jews which are in all the king’s provinces”. “Reverse” is shûwb, to turn back or return. Esther asks that Haman’s letters be turned back. She names their author in full and their purpose plainly, the destruction of the Jews in every province of the empire. The king will answer her with the same word in verse 8.

Verse 6 gives the reason for her plea. “For how can I endure to see the evil that shall come unto my people? or how can I endure to see the destruction of my kindred?” The question “how can I endure” comes twice in this verse, and it looks for no answer. It tells the king that what is coming is past her bearing. “Endure” is yâkôl, to be able, to prevail, to bear, here in the form ukhal, “can I”. What she is unable to do is stand by and watch.

“Evil” is raʻ again, the same word that stood behind “mischief” in verse 3, so the evil Haman devised is the evil that will fall on her people. “Destruction” is ʼobdan, perishing or ruin, the end of a people.

The two halves move from the wider circle to the nearer. “My people” (ʻammi) is the whole nation of the Jews, and “my kindred” (moladti) is her own family, those of her birth. The threat to the nation is a threat to her own flesh and blood, and she counts their ruin as her own sorrow. Scripture tells us to “weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15), and Esther’s grief has the heart of Moses, who stood before God for Israel (Exodus 32:32), and of Paul, who was willing to be accursed for the sake of his people (Romans 9:3).

“Then the king Ahasuerus said unto Esther the queen and to Mordecai the Jew, Behold, I have given Esther the house of Haman, and him they have hanged upon the gallows, because he laid his hand upon the Jews.” The king speaks to both of them, a queen who had risked her life and a man who had been marked for the gallows, and both now stand in his favour. He points to what he has already done. Haman’s house, his estate with its lands, servants and wealth, has been taken from him and given to Esther. Kings of that time commonly seized the property of a condemned official, both to punish the traitor and to reward the loyal. The enemy’s goods are now in the hands of the people he meant to destroy.

“Him they have hanged upon the gallows.” The word for gallows, ʻêts, means tree or wood, and it may describe a stake for impaling as well as a gallows. It was the very one Haman had set up for Mordecai. Scripture says the same thing many times over: whoever digs a pit falls into it (Proverbs 26:27), the wicked man’s mischief returns upon his own head (Psalm 7:15–16), and whatever a man sows, he reaps (Galatians 6:7).

The king names the crime: “because he laid his hand upon the Jews”. The Hebrew phrase, shâlach yado, is an idiom for hostile action, reaching out to do someone harm. Haman, Hâmân, had stretched out his hand against a whole people, and the king now condemns it plainly. Behind this lies God’s care for his people, promised to Abraham when God said he would bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him (Genesis 12:3).

“Write ye also for the Jews, as it liketh you, in the king’s name, and seal it with the king’s ring: for the writing which is written in the king’s name, and sealed with the king’s ring, may no man reverse.”

The king hands Esther and Mordecai the power to write, kâthab, a new law, and in this setting writing means legislating. Mordecai already holds the king’s ring (Esther 8:2), the ring that had sealed Haman’s letters. “As it liketh you” is literally “as is good in your eyes”, with ṭôwb, good, and ʻayin, eye. Esther had hoped to be pleasing in the king’s eyes, and now he leaves the wording of the decree to what is good in theirs. “In the king’s name” joins shêm, name, and melek, king. “Seal” is châtham, and the ring is ṭabbaʻath, a signet, from a root meaning to sink, as a seal is sunk into wax. A writing sealed with it carried the king’s full authority through every province.

“The king’s name” and “the king’s ring” each come twice in this verse, once in the command and once in the reason. The authority that made Haman’s letters unbreakable will make the new letters just as strong.

God’s name is never mentioned in the book of Esther, and his hand is plain in these verses all the same. “The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD” (Proverbs 21:1), and here the favour of a Persian king turns once more toward Esther. The LORD brings the plans of the nations to nothing, and “The counsel of the LORD standeth for ever” (Psalm 33:10–11). As with Joseph, what men meant for evil God meant for good (Genesis 50:20). Haman’s carefully devised plan is about to be turned upside down, so that on the very day the Jews’ enemies hoped to rule over them, the Jews rule over those who hated them (Esther 9:1), and days of feasting and gladness follow (Esther 9:22).

God works here through people. A queen’s tears, a king’s goodwill, Mordecai’s pen and the rules of an empire all serve his purpose. This is why Paul asks for prayers for kings and all in authority (1 Timothy 2:1–2), since their courts are within God’s reach. And since God is for his people, whatever is set against them in the end falls short (Romans 8:31–39).

Esther risked her life before an earthly king for a people under sentence of death, and in that she points to Christ. We were all under such a sentence, for death came to all through one man’s sin (Romans 5:12), and the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). Christ took our flesh and shared our weakness so that he could deliver us (Hebrews 2:14–18). In the days of his flesh he prayed with tears (Hebrews 5:7), and in Gethsemane he asked, “if it be possible, let this cup pass from me” (Matthew 26:39), and then drank it for us. Esther asked how she could endure to see her kindred destroyed. Christ endured the cross so that his people would be saved, laying down his life for his friends (John 15:13) and dying for us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8). He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), offered once to bear the sins of many (Hebrews 9:28), and he lives for ever to make intercession for those who come to God by him (Hebrews 7:25).

The shape of verse 8 also points to the gospel. God’s righteous law against sin stands, and God has answered our condemnation with a new and better covenant (Hebrews 8:6–13), sealed with the blood of Christ (Hebrews 9:15–22). The record of debt against us was nailed to the cross, and Christ triumphed openly over the powers that held us (Colossians 2:13–15). The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2). The Jews’ new decree was sealed with the king’s ring, and believers are sealed with the Holy Spirit as the pledge of their inheritance, until the day of redemption (Ephesians 1:13–14, Ephesians 4:30).

Haman, who set out to destroy God’s people, is a picture of the enemy who comes to steal, to kill and to destroy (John 10:10). Haman fell on the gallows he had made, and at the cross the enemy’s own weapon, death, was turned against him. Esther received Haman’s house, and in Christ believers become heirs of God together with him (Romans 8:17).

These verses show a God who keeps his people even when their danger has been written into law, and who uses a queen’s courage, a king’s favour and the very rules of an empire to do it. They show what pleading for others looks like, with humility, with tears and with persistence after the first victory, and they show that grief for one’s own people is a right and faithful grief.

Above all they point to the one who pleads for us. Esther had to wait for a sceptre to be held out, while we have been told to come boldly to the throne of grace through Christ, who lives to intercede for us. The sentence that stood against us has been answered by a better covenant, sealed with his blood, and it stands for ever.