Haman's Daughter Poured Filth on the Wrong Man

The Procession Through the City

Haman walked through the streets of Shushan leading a horse. On the horse sat Mordecai, dressed in royal robes, wearing the crown. Haman's voice carried through the public thoroughfares of the capital, announcing that this was what the king did for a man he wished to honor. He said the words. He walked the route. He led the animal by its bridle, his own footsteps in the dust beneath the hooves, the reins looped through a hand that had wanted nothing all morning but to sign a death warrant.

His own name was poison in his mouth the entire time. Each call he raised drew faces to the doorways and the rooftops of Shushan, and every one of them watched the second most powerful man in the empire walking on foot before a Jew in the king's crown.

The Babylonian Talmud's tractate Megillah records what Haman had come to the palace to do that morning: he had wanted to ask the king's permission to hang Mordecai on the gallows he had built. The gallows were ready, the wood raised and waiting in his own courtyard. He had the plan. He had left his house early, before the light was full, to get there before anyone else could reach the king first. Instead he had been handed a horse and a script and sent through the city as Mordecai's herald, dressing his enemy in glory with his own hands and proclaiming it street by street.

The Window Above the Street

Somewhere along the route, a window opened. Haman's daughter looked down to see what the noise in the street was about. She saw a man leading a horse and a man on the horse, the crowd parting around them. She made a reasonable assumption about which was which: her father was powerful, Mordecai was the target. The man on the horse, robed and crowned, riding above the heads of the people, must be her father in his triumph. The man walking and leading the animal on foot, head bent, must be Mordecai, disgraced and broken at last.

She was wrong about everything.

She reached for the chamber pot, lifted it to the sill, and emptied its contents straight down onto the head of the man walking below.

The Moment of Recognition

Haman looked up. The filth was running down his face when his eyes found the window, and in the window he saw his own daughter. He understood in that instant exactly what had happened and who had done it. The tradition records his face at this moment: he let his head fall in grief, fouled and exposed in the open street before the whole city. And the shock of what she had done, when the recognition struck her, was total. She had aimed at the disgraced Jew and struck her own father instead. The Legends of the Jews records that she threw herself from the window. She did not survive the fall.

Haman gathered the procession to its end and arrived home that evening with his head covered, in mourning, having spent the day honoring his enemy through the streets of the capital and having just watched his daughter die in the worst possible way, believing at the last instant that she had destroyed her own father.

The Line From Agag

The tradition behind Haman's ultimate destruction runs further back than the palace gate. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, a midrashic text from roughly the eighth century CE, traces the chain from Esau's sin forward through generations. Esau's hatred of Jacob passed through Amalek. The prophet Samuel stood over King Saul's incomplete execution of Agag, king of Amalek, and saw the consequence clearly: the survival of Agag for one night was enough. Agag fathered a child that night. The line continued. Haman was born from that continuation. The disaster of Purim was traceable to a single failure of nerve at a moment when the job should have been finished.