Mordecai Refused to Bow Because Creation Itself Refused

The palace servants at the gate had a legitimate question. Every person at the palace gate had been ordered to bow before Haman, the king's new favorite. Everyone complied. Everyone except Mordecai. The servants, watching this daily refusal, eventually pressed him on it. "Wherein art thou better than we, that we should pay reverence to Haman and prostrate ourselves, and thou doest naught of all commanded us?"

Mordecai answered them. The answer, preserved in the midrash on Mordecai at the dawn of creation, was not a brief theological statement. It was a description of God's relationship to the physical universe so comprehensive that it left no conceptual room for the act being demanded of him.

He began with the nature of human beings. "Who is man that he should act proudly and arrogantly," he said, "man born of woman and few in days? At his birth there is weeping and travailing, in his youth pain and groans, all his days are full of trouble, and in the end he returns unto dust." Before such a creature, he would not prostrate himself.

Then he described what he would bow before. God holds the earth in his arms. God stretches out the heavens in his might. God darkens the sun when it pleases him. God illumines the darkness. God commanded the sand to set bounds unto the seas. God made the waters of the sea salt. God chained the sea as with manacles and held it fast in the depths of the abyss so that it might not overflow the land. "It rages," Mordecai said, "yet it cannot pass its limits." With his word God created the firmament, stretched it like a cloud in the air, cast it over the world like a dark vault, like a tent spread over the earth. In his strength he upholds all there is above and below. The sun, the moon, and the Pleiades run before him. The stars and the planets are not idle for a single moment. They speed before him as messengers, going left and right, to do the will of him who created them.

This speech was addressed to palace servants who had asked a procedural question about court etiquette. Mordecai answered it with the entire cosmology. This was not disproportionate. It was the only honest answer. The reason he could not bow before Haman was not that he had a personal grudge against Haman, though his lineage as a Benjaminite and Haman's lineage as an Amalekite made them hereditary adversaries. The reason was that prostration before any human being would have constituted a lie about the structure of reality. God alone had earned that posture. Everyone else was, at best, made of dust that had been temporarily animated.

The servants reported this to Haman. Haman was furious enough that he decided destroying Mordecai individually was insufficient. He would destroy all the Jews. But before that destruction could be arranged, there was the matter of the king's sleepless night and the chronicles being read aloud, and the entry that mentioned Mordecai's report of the assassination plot against Ahasuerus, and the question of what honor had been done for Mordecai, and the answer that no honor had been done at all.

Haman arrived at the palace early the next morning intending to ask permission to hang Mordecai on the gallows he had already constructed. The king asked him first: "What shall be done unto the man whom the king delighteth to honor?" Haman assumed the king meant him. He described an elaborate ceremony: royal robes, a royal horse, a public proclamation through the streets of the city by one of the king's most noble princes.

The king said: do exactly that for Mordecai the Jew.

The procession that followed, recorded in the tradition of Haman's humiliation, was vast. Twenty-seven thousand youths from the court marched before them, bearing golden cups in their right hands and golden beakers in their left, proclaiming: "Thus shall be done unto the man whom the king delighteth to honor." The Jews who joined the procession added their own proclamation, of a different tenor: "Thus shall be done unto the man whose honor is desired by the King that hath created heaven and earth."

The Ginzberg tradition, drawing on sources reaching back through the Talmudic period, understood this parade as the visible expression of what Mordecai had argued at the gate. He had said there was only one King whose honor deserved prostration. The Jewish participants in the procession said the same thing out loud, in the street, with Haman leading the horse. The cosmology Mordecai had explained to the palace servants was now being proclaimed through the city by the very man who had wanted to destroy him.

The rabbinic tradition that shaped these scenes saw Mordecai's refusal to bow not as stubbornness or political bravery but as a statement of fact. He could not bow before Haman for the same reason he could not deny that the sea was bounded by sand. Both things were simply true about how the world was built. And the world, being built that way, eventually arranged events to confirm it.