The Book of Esther opens with a single verse that the rabbis of Esther Rabbah read as a cry of anguish: "It was during the days of Ahasuerus" (Esther 1:1). But to understand why that verse carried such weight, the midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) first turns to a terrifying prophecy buried in the Torah's curses.
Rav connected the Esther story to a verse in Deuteronomy that describes escalating dread: "Your life will be suspended before you, and you will fear night and day, and you will not be assured of your life" (Deuteronomy 28:66). The rabbis and Rabbi Berekhya disagreed about the literal meaning of these three stages. One opinion said they describe a person who buys wheat for a year, then only from a retailer, then only from a baker. Rabbi Berekhya stretched the scale further: three years of supply, then one year, then a retailer. When the rabbis pressed him about the baker, he replied with a devastating punchline: "The Torah did not speak of the dead." Someone dependent on a baker is already beyond hope.
Another interpretation mapped the verse onto the Roman legal system: prison in Caesarea, then trial, then execution by hanging. But Rav took the entire prophecy and laid it directly over the events of the Purim story. "Your life will be suspended before you" referred to the day Ahasuerus removed his signet ring and handed it to Haman, authorizing him to do whatever he wished to the Jews (Esther 3:10-11). "You will fear night and day" described the moment Haman's letters were dispatched across 127 provinces (Esther 3:13-15). And "you will not be assured of your life" pointed to the chilling instruction "to be ready for that day" (Esther 3:14).
The midrash treats these escalating stages as a precise match. The ring transfer was abstract menace. The letters made it concrete. The appointed date made it inescapable. What Moses foresaw as a curse centuries earlier, Haman executed as policy.