The Hebrew Bible contains a hidden signal that tells you, in a single prefix, whether a king's reign brought joy or catastrophe. Rabbi Yitzhak discovered it buried in the grammar of SAFE0 Rabbah, and it works across every monarch in the text.
He began with a proverb: "With the rise of the righteous the people rejoice, and with the rule of the wicked the people sigh" (Proverbs 29:2). Then he showed how the Torah encodes this principle directly into its syntax. When a righteous king is mentioned, the text uses the prefix "veha-" before the word "king" (vehamelekh). That prefix, va, is an expression of joy. "And the King David" (II Samuel 3:31). "And the King Solomon" (I Kings 2:45). "And the King Asa" (I Kings 15:22). The pattern extends even to righteous gentile kings: "And Cyrus the King" (Ezra 1:4). Each time, the prefix va signals celebration.
But when a wicked king takes power, the text uses a different construction: vayimlokh, "and he reigned." That prefix, vai, is an expression of woe. "Ahab son of Omri reigned" (I Kings 16:29)—vai that Ahab reigned. "Hoshea son of Ela reigned" (II Kings 15:30)—vai that Hoshea reigned. "Zedekiah son of Josiah reigned" (Jeremiah 37:1)—vai that Zedekiah reigned.
The pattern reaches its climax with the opening of the Book of Esther. "It was (vayhi) during the days of Ahasuerus" (Esther 1:1). The vai is unmistakable. Woe that Ahasuerus reigned. The midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) argues that the text itself is groaning. Before a reader even gets past the first word, the grammar has already delivered its verdict.