Angel of Fury Blew Sulfur into Ahasuerus

The hall had been drinking for a week when the summons went out to the women's wing, and the answer came back that the queen would not come.

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Vashti sent it in front of the princes of a hundred and twenty-seven provinces. Cupbearers stopped mid-pour. The men nearest the throne began measuring the distance to the doors.

And Ahasuerus felt something climb his ribs that was too large for the insult that caused it.

Descend and Blow on Him

Above the roof beams the Holy One gave an order to the angel set over fury.

Go down. Blow wind into his belly. Fan his coals. Throw sulfur on his furnace.

The angel went. What entered the king that night was not the ordinary rage of a man embarrassed at his own table, which flares, burns its fuel, and is gone by the second cup of the next morning. This had a bellows behind it and a hand on the bellows. Every time the court decided the weather had turned, another draught found the coals.

Vashti was killed. The decree was written and copied out to every province in its own script. The floors were scrubbed and the hall was reopened. None of it made any difference to the fire, because the fire had not been lit by Vashti and did not answer to her absence.

A King Who Reigned and Had Not Reigned

The scroll opens by saying that this was the Ahasuerus who ruled from Hodu to Kush, a hundred and twenty-seven provinces, and the Sages heard something crooked in the phrasing. He reigned, they said, and had not yet reigned. No father had handed him the throne. He had taken it, and a throne taken has to be re-taken every morning in the eyes of the men who watch him sit on it.

That is dry timber. A man who has inherited a crown can survive a wife who says no to him in public. A man who is still proving the crown cannot.

The angel of fury had not built the flaw. He had only been sent to a house that was already full of kindling.

An Abating That Was Not an Abating

The scribes wrote afterward that the fury of King Ahasuerus abated, and Rabbi Yohanan would not let the sentence stand as written. Not with the abating, he said. Like the abating. A cooling shaped like a cooling. Smoke still coming off it.

Servants learned the difference and lived by it. They learned which hours to bring reports and which hours to be elsewhere. They learned that a quiet king is not the same thing as a cool one. Officers who had watched Vashti's night from a safe corner discovered that the safe corner moved.

Out in the provinces the gathering of girls began, cartloads of daughters coming up the roads toward a palace that nobody outside it understood was burning.

Esther Walked Into the Weather

When Esther was taken into the house of the women, she was not walking into a marriage. She was walking into a climate.

She learned it the way people learn a sea that has already drowned better sailors than they are. Which day he could be approached. Which silence meant nothing and which silence meant get out of the room. She kept her people and her city out of her mouth for years inside that heat, and the heat never once let up, because the angel had been given no order to stop.

Her cousin sat in the gate in sackcloth and would not bow to the man the king had raised over every prince. Lots were cast. Letters went out with a date on them for the killing of every Jew in the empire, and the two men who signed the thing sat down to drink while the city of Shushan stood in the street not understanding what it had just been told.

All of it ran on the same fire. The angel had never left the room.

Two Furies Went Out at Once

Then a night came when the king could not sleep, and the book of records was read to him, and a man who had built a gallows fifty cubits high for someone else was made to lead that someone else through the streets on the king's own horse.

They hanged Haman on the timber he had raised for Mordecai, and the scroll says the king's fury abated, and this time there is no hedge on the word.

Rabbi Yohanan heard a second king in that sentence. Not only did the fury of Ahasuerus go out. The fury of the King of kings went out, the anger that had been riding this whole long rage the way a rider stays on a horse he cannot yet dismount from. The decree against Israel had burned itself down to the last of its own wood.

The palace air changed that hour and the courtiers did not trust it for a month. Somewhere above the roof beams an angel wiped the sulfur off his hands and waited to be sent again. Ahasuerus never learned that he had been the fire and the coal and the bellows and the sealed room. He only knew that for years he could not stop burning, and that after one hanging he could.