Haman Once Sold Himself to Mordechai as a Slave

The Book of Esther opens with Haman already in power, already promoted, already seething at Mordechai for refusing to bow. The text never quite explains why Haman's hatred runs so deep. The rabbinic tradition thought that was sloppy. They wanted a backstory. And they built one that reads like an origin myth for genocide.

According to Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's seven-volume synthesis of rabbinic lore published between 1909 and 1938, Haman and Mordechai had met long before Shushan. Years earlier, Haman had been a general leading an army through a distant campaign, and his troops had started to starve. Famine was eating them alive. They threatened mutiny. Haman was desperate enough to turn to the one man in the region who had food: Mordechai.

Mordechai listened to Haman's proposal and refused money. Instead, he made a single, humiliating counter-offer. Mordechai would feed Haman's army if Haman agreed to sell himself into slavery, to become Mordechai's personal slave. And Haman, with no way out, accepted.

There was no parchment in the camp. There was no scribe. So the agreement was literally carved into Mordechai's kneecap. A bill of sale scratched into human skin. The rabbinic imagination loved this detail because it made sense of everything that happened later. It explained why Haman hated Mordechai the way a man hates a witness. It explained why Mordechai refused to bow. It explained why, whenever Haman passed him at the palace gate, Mordechai would sit in a certain way that let the scar on his knee become visible.

The deed was on that knee. Every time Haman walked by, Mordechai flashed him the contract.

It was the slowest insult in ancient history. And it eventually metastasized into something larger than the two men. Ginzberg records that Haman's hatred, which began as a personal resentment between a debtor and a creditor, expanded first to Mordechai's students, then to the rabbinic scholars, then to the entire Jewish people. A grudge the size of a kneecap became a decree the size of an empire.

Then came the night the king could not sleep.

Josephus, the first-century Roman-Jewish historian, tells the reversal in his Antiquities of the Jews, completed around 93 CE. King Artaxerxes (the Greek name for the Persian king the Hebrew text calls Ahasuerus) could not rest, and ordered his chronicles read aloud. They reached the entry about Mordechai uncovering the assassination plot against the crown. "What honor has been given to this man?" the king asked. The servants said: nothing. At that exact moment, Haman walked into court, having come to ask permission to hang Mordechai on a gallows fifty cubits high. Before he could open his mouth, the king asked him: "What should be done for the man the king wishes to honor?" Haman, assuming the man was himself, described the most lavish public honor he could imagine. "Excellent," the king said. "Do all of this for Mordechai the Jew."

Ginzberg's retelling of the conversation that followed reads like a small masterpiece of comic horror. Haman tried every escape hatch. He begged the king to appoint Mordechai ruler over a city instead. Ahasuerus said no. Haman offered to give Mordechai ten thousand talents of silver. Ahasuerus said no. Haman offered his own ten sons as runners before Mordechai's horse. Ahasuerus said no. Haman offered to let Ahasuerus strike coins bearing Mordechai's face alongside his own name. The king still said no. He was locked in. Every dignity Haman would have accepted instead of leading Mordechai through the streets was higher than what the king was actually asking for, and the king refused them all.

What Haman did not know, but the reader of the Megillah does, is that the gallows fifty cubits high was already waiting in his own backyard. He had built it the night before for Mordechai.

But Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the eighth-century aggadic work edited in the Land of Israel that pulls apart the Megillah like a watchmaker, adds one more humiliation to the parade. When Haman arrived at Mordechai's door carrying the royal purple, Mordechai refused to put it on. He had been wearing sackcloth and ashes for three days, fasting and mourning for Haman's decree, and he said, "Villain, do you not know that for three days I have been in sack-cloth with ashes because of what you have done to me?" He demanded that Haman take him first to the bathhouse to wash off the ashes. Haman had to scrub him.

Then Mordechai said he was too weak from fasting to climb onto the horse. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer says Haman had to kneel and become a human stepping-stool so that Mordechai could place his foot on Haman's neck to mount. In the instant his foot touched Haman's throat, Mordechai quoted Deuteronomy 33:29: "You shall tread upon their high places." The old bill of sale, carved on his knee, had finally come due in full.

The story does not end with the hanging. It ends with the accounting. Ginzberg records that Haman's estate was divided into three parts. One third went to Mordechai and Esther. One third was endowed to support Torah scholars in perpetuity. And the final third was dedicated to the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem. The wealth Haman had gathered to fund the annihilation of the Jews became, by the end, a pension fund for Jewish students and a rebuilding fund for the Temple. Every coin he had saved for genocide ended up propping up the thing he had tried to destroy.

The rabbis are very careful with their closing note. Mordechai, elevated to high office, did rise. He became second to the king. But he slipped, they say, from the sixth greatest Torah scholar of his generation to the seventh. The higher the political throne, the smaller the time for study. Power cost him one rung. It was the only rung it cost him. And it was the only rung, the rabbis whisper, that Haman's ten thousand talents could not buy.