Zeresh Designed the Gallows and Her Sons Hanged on It

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The Only Counsel Worth Hearing

Two hundred and eight of them filled the room, sons and friends and hangers-on, and every mouth had a plan. Haman sat among them still shaking from the gate of Shushan, where one Jew had refused to bend a knee to him. Burn him, one said. Chain him in a pit. Drive him into the wilderness. Put out his eyes. Haman listened, and none of it cooled the heat in his chest.

Then his wife spoke, and the room went quiet.

"If the man you speak of is a Jew," Zeresh said, "you will do nothing to him except by cunning." She had studied this people the way a general studies a wall before he throws men at it. Fire? She named Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, who walked out of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace without the smell of smoke on their coats. Prison? "Joseph went free from prison." The desert? "The wilderness did no harm to the Israelites who crossed it." Blind him, then. "Samson blind pulled down more than Samson seeing ever did."

One by one she closed the doors her husband's friends had thrown open. Every rescue in their history, she showed, had a seam a miracle could slip through. All but one.

"Hang him," she said. "No Jew has ever escaped death on the gallows."

The Craftsmen She Summoned Before Nightfall

Haman went home glad for the first time in days, and Zeresh did not wait for morning. She sent for men who worked wood and men who worked iron and set them to raising a beam fifty cubits tall, higher than the roofs, higher than the trees, high enough that all of Shushan would have to look up to see the shape hanging there.

While the carpenters cut and the smiths hammered, she took up a cithern and played. The strings rang out over the yard like a wedding tune. Her children heard it and came, and they danced around the rising post, in and out of the shadow it threw longer and longer across the ground as it climbed. None of them stopped to ask whose weight the beam was measured to hold.

Haman moved among the workers promising reward. "To the woodworkers I will give wages in plenty," he called, "and the ironworkers I will seat at my own banquet." A gallows going up like a feast hall, a mother playing over the sound of the saws, sons laughing at the foot of it.

Haman Climbs to Test the Beam

When it stood finished against the sky, Haman could not keep his hands off it. He wanted to be sure the thing would hold, that the rope would run clean, that nothing would fail him in the morning when he dragged Mordecai out to die on it. So he climbed. He set his own weight to the wood his wife had designed and tested every joint of it himself.

A voice came down out of heaven while he stood there. It did not shout. It said, as if noting a plain fact, "It is good for Haman the villain, and for the son of Hammedatha it is fitting." He heard it and did not understand it. He climbed down and went to bed, and above him the beam waited in the dark, already fitted, he thought, to another man's neck.

The Older Cunning in Shimei's House

Zeresh had built her whole plan on one certainty. No daughter of Israel, no son of it, could out-scheme her. But an older cunning had already been laid down against her, generations back, in a house she had never heard of.

When David was at war with his own son Absalom, two of the king's spies, Jonathan and Ahimaaz, ran from Absalom's soldiers and found a gate standing open. It was the house of Shimei. They dropped down into the well in the yard, and Shimei's wife, whose name no one wrote down, moved fast. She spread cloth over the mouth of the well and dressed it as a woman's chamber, curtained and private, and when the soldiers came searching she let them look. They would not push into a lady's room after men as righteous as those two. They gave up the search. The spies lived.

For hiding two righteous men, the tradition holds, that nameless woman was promised two righteous descendants who would one day stand in a Persian court and turn back the ruin of Israel. Her quiet trick in the yard was still working while Zeresh played her cithern.

The Wood Took Her Own House

Morning did not go as Zeresh had measured it. The man she meant to hang rode through Shushan in royal robes with her own husband leading the horse. By the time the sun went down it was Haman the king's officers came for, and the beam fifty cubits tall took the man who ordered it built. The rope ran clean. Zeresh had seen to that herself.

Her sons did not dance long. Ten of them were hanged on wood before the story was done, and the household that had laughed around the rising post was scattered and stripped and remembered only for the gallows it raised. The woman who measured the beam outlived the use she built it for, and every joint she had tested held exactly as she promised, against her own.