Haman Rode Through Susa and One Man Would Not Bow

Everything He Had

Take the measure of what Haman had accumulated. He had the king's ring, which was the king's authority made portable and transferable. He had a decree stamped and distributed to every province of the Persian Empire, carrying a death date and his own signature. He had ten sons, a wife from the family of the Persian satrap Tattenai, and wealth stacked so high he had begun wearing a representation of his own treasure chamber on his chest as a pendant. When his horse moved through the streets of Susa, every person it passed bowed down.

He had everything.

Except one thing.

The Man at the Gate

Mordecai sat at the palace gate and did not bow. Did not kneel. Did not incline his head. And according to the full tradition, he did something even more pointed: he pointed to his own knee, where a bill of sale was written. During a year of famine, Haman had come to Mordecai starving, and Mordecai had fed him. In exchange, Haman had signed himself over as servant. The debt was documented. The document was on Mordecai's body.

Now this man, who had once depended on Mordecai's charity to survive a lean year, who had sold himself to eat, demanded that the man who had fed him prostrate himself in the street. And Mordecai sat and did not bow.

What the Fury Required

A proportionate response would have been an arrest warrant. Have Mordecai brought up on a charge, deal with him quietly, move on. But Haman was not capable of proportion by this point. The wound was too specific. He had been humiliated by a man who had once owned him, in public, repeatedly, in front of the court. A targeted execution would not satisfy what he felt. He needed something large enough to match the size of the affront, which is the mechanical explanation for how one man's refusal to bow in a marketplace became a plan to kill every Jew in the Persian Empire.

He went home to consult his wife and his 365 counselors. Zeresh was not home. She was visiting, the tradition notes with dry precision, paramours of her own. Haman sent for her. When she and the counselors assembled, he put the question to them. None of the 365 advisers came up with anything useful. It was his wife who told him what he wanted to hear, and what she told him was the gallows.

What He Said to the King

Esther Rabbah preserves the speech Haman delivered to Ahasuerus. There is one people, scattered and dispersed across all the provinces of the kingdom, whose laws are different from every other people's laws, and who do not keep the king's laws. It is not worth tolerating them. The midrash reads the Hebrew of Haman's opening word, yeshno, as a hidden accusation: the God of this people is asleep, yashen, for them. God has abandoned His people and they are now yours to destroy.

God's response to this, the midrash records, was immediate and private: there is no sleep before Me. The guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps. By your life, I will awaken from sleep against that man and eliminate him.