Last year, we talked about the stories of Esther and Vashti but this year we are going to focus on irresponsible King Ahasuerus, Esther’s cousin Mordecai who didn’t follow his own wise advice, and the wicked Haman.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions.
This week is the Jewish Festival of Purim, when the Jewish people celebrate being saved from the schemes of the wicked villain Haman, who wanted every Jew in the world dead. But how did Haman even get the chance to kill every Jew in the Persian Empire? He wasn’t a king or anything, so it wasn’t like he could just wave his hand and make it happen. And why did he even want to do that in the first place? It’s a very complicated story and one of the only books on the Bible where God is never mentioned even though we can tell He is there because of how everything worked together to save His people from being totally destroyed. Although this isn’t one of the Feasts commanded by the Lord, the Jewish people still celebrate the great victory over evil in the Book of Esther by celebrating Purim as a tribute to God and so that they will always remember that God is working to save His people even when they can’t see Him.
But why did they need saving in the first place? Because of one foolish man who had a lot of power but was also easily manipulated and drank way too much wine, and one very proud wicked man who knew how to get exactly what he wanted, and a third man who took a terrible risk that almost got his people murdered. Last year we talked about the two brave Queens who had to deal with the consequences of what these three men were doing, even though they had no power, and this year we are going to talk about the other side of the situation—which will teach us a lot about how we should always make our decisions very carefully, choose our friends wisely, and make sure that we don’t get into situations where we are easy to trick.
The Book of Esther opens up with a huge party going on in the Fortress of Susa. And the Bible rarely describes how buildings look, and especially on the inside, but the description of this one is pretty amazing. The story begins at the end of a six-month-long party just for the rich and powerful, but then they added on a last week and opened the party to everyone. There were gold and silver couches and beautiful fabrics hanging from silver rods and the wine goblets were made out of gold! That’s not what my couches and water glasses are made out of! Even the floors were fancy. And by order of the new King, Ahasuerus, everyone at the party could drink as much as they wanted of whatever they wanted. For a whole week! They definitely weren’t drinking water, and the Bible is telling us this to let us know that the King and everyone with him were drunk from drinking way too much wine and they shouldn’t be making any decisions at all and especially not important ones. It’s always very foolish to be making decisions when a person is drunk. And that’s where all the problems started because after seven days of this, the king ordered his eunuchs to bring the Queen wearing her crown. Would you want to go to a place where everyone had been drinking too much for seven whole days? I sure wouldn’t. I would be scared, and angry, and really disappointed if my husband did that to me. A husband should protect his wife and not expose her to danger and shame—but King Ahaseurus was drunk and so he wasn’t thinking straight. We don’t know how he got the idea to show her off because the Bible doesn’t say, but we do know he was very drunk and so was everyone else at his party. In those days, that was no safe place for a woman to be. And it wouldn’t be safe now either. Vashti had been trained since she was a little girl to protect herself from shame. And so, she refused to go to the King. Nowadays, we would tell her she was really smart but then, her husband could have her killed and no one would even try to stop him. It was a very wicked world.
Because he was so drunk, he got really angry and took some bad advice and got rid of Queen Vashti right away without even thinking about the consequences, just because his advisors said that if he didn’t, women wouldn’t be scared enough of their husbands to obey them no matter what they told them to do. The King had her sent away and made it a law that she couldn’t ever see him again, because that’s what his advisors told him to do. But once he wasn’t drunk anymore, he remembered what had happened. His closest personal attendants launched a plan to get him a new queen which involved kidnapping beautiful girls from all over the Persian Empire and bringing them to the palace, where they would spend the rest of their lives. Instead of reconsidering his life choices, he took their advice because it sounded good to him. I mean, come on, there’s a good chance that the advice came from the same people who told him to get rid of Queen Vashti when he was too drunk to think clearly. As we are going to find out, the King is very foolish and surrounds himself with people who tell him to do terrible things (the things they want him to do for their own benefit) and he is way too trusting—either that or he maybe thinks that because he is king, no one would dare try to get him to do things he will regret later. Ahasuerus was the worst sort of King, because he had no wisdom and trusted the wrong people and didn’t spend much time doing his own thinking.
Out of all the girls who were taken from their homes, it was a Jewish girl named Hadassah who became queen. She was an orphan whose parents had died and her older cousin Mordecai adopted her as his own daughter. Mordecai knew what had happened to Vashti and told her to hide who she was, so that no one would find out she was a Jew. So, she went by the name of Esther instead. Mordecai was very wise to do this, because probably everyone knew that it was dangerous to get the King angry and if he got angry at Esther, he might turn around and hurt her family to get even. And no one could stop him. So Esther did what Mordecai told her to do and no one knew who she really was or who her people were. The King loved her best of all the young women and made her the Queen and threw a feast in her honor. Because she was hiding who she was, her family wasn’t at her own wedding banquet! But that didn’t stop Mordecai from doing everything he could to make sure she was okay. He even protected the King’s life from people who were plotting to kill him. Even though Mordecai couldn’t see Esther, he was still looking out for her like a good father should.
But Mordecai decided to do something, or not do something, that put his people in terrible danger. The King decided to make a man named Haman very important—in fact, he made Haman second in command of his whole empire, over all the other important officials. Haman had power like Joseph in Egypt, but Haman wasn’t anything like Joseph! But Haman was more than just some random guy that the King liked—Haman was an Agagite, which made him an ancient enemy of the Jews. He was an Amalekite, and we will talk about them more when we learn about Moses and the Exodus. The King commanded that everyone bow down to Haman as he went by but Mordecai decided not to. And the other people at the King’s gate (the place where business was done and decisions were made), warned him over and over again but Mordecai wouldn’t budge. Finally, all those people went and told Haman about Mordecai disrespecting him by not bowing down—and Haman was furious. Haman was even more furious because Mordecai had told them that he was a Jew, his ancient enemies.
Isn’t that strange? Mordecai told Esther not to make any trouble and not tell anyone who she was so that her people would be protected, and then Mordecai did the exact opposite! Mordecai was wise in what he told Esther to do but when the time came for him to do something much simpler, he refused to do it. Haman wouldn’t have ever noticed Mordecai if he had just bowed down like everyone else, and if Mordecai hadn’t told everyone he was a Jew, then maybe Haman would have just been angry at Mordecai and that would be that. But Mordecai did exactly what he told Esther not to do and because Haman was second-in-command of the entire Persian Empire, there was almost no limit to what he could do to get revenge. And so the wicked Haman decided to do the worst—not only to punish Mordecai or kill him, but to kill every single Jew in the world. The Persian Empire was made up of 127 provinces from Egypt to Greece and Turkey all the way east to the border of India. At that point, all the Jews in the entire world would have lived in that Empire and Haman decided to use his power to kill them all. Things couldn’t possibly be any worse. Haman did some of his pagan rituals and came up with a date but unfortunately for him the date was almost a year away.
But that didn’t seem to bother Haman, and he got right to work setting his evil plan into action. He went right over to the King and made up some really terrible stories about “a certain ethnic group” not obeying the laws of the kingdom (I mean, one guy not bowing down before Haman isn’t exactly the same thing as not obeying the laws—it was just one guy disobeying one law over and over again). Haman also said that they had their own laws, which was true but none of those laws would cause any problems for the King or their neighbors. Plus, he said, they were scattered throughout the Empire—which was also true but that was because they had been exiled all over the place from Egypt to Susa. The truth is that Haman was incredibly vague, on purpose. He didn’t say, “The Jews are a problem” because if he had then maybe the King would go out and fact check him. But we know now from experience that King Ahasuerus was a very irresponsible man who trusted the wrong people over and over again—getting himself and others into deep trouble. And just in case that wasn’t enough to convince the King, he offered him 375 tons of silver—that’s 750,000 lbs and would be worth 267 million dollars today. It looks like Haman has been getting rich serving the King and he is willing to just about anything to get his revenge. The King was even richer than that so he didn’t want the money but told Haman to do whatever he wanted to do and then he did something even more foolish—he took off his signet ring and just handed it to Haman.
Now, you have to know about signet rings, okay? How important they were and what you could do with one. In those days, people didn’t sign contracts or agreements with ink and a pen. In places like Babylon and Susa, if a king wanted to make an announcement or make a new law, the scribes would write it out and then the king would press his ring into each one like a signature. His ring was unique, so anyone who saw the imprint would know that it came directly from the King. That meant that whatever it said was like the King was saying it himself and you had better obey it or else. That also means that whoever has the signet ring can do whatever they want—and the King just handed his ring over to Haman. For all intents and purposes, Haman is the king now. The royal scribes made at least 127 copies telling the people that on the 13th day of Adar, that the officials and soldiers had to kill every Jewish man, woman, and child and as an added bonus, they could steal everything they owned. Haman thought of everything—not only did the most powerful people have to obey the command to kill the Jews, they would become rich doing it. Pretty soon, even the regular neighbors of the Jews in the Persian Empire wanted to kill them and take all their stuff. Giving Haman the signet ring was like handing another person all your credit cards and telling them to buy whatever they want, no questions asked.
Haman wasn’t a nice guy, but neither was the King. He was willing to have an entire ethnic group slaughtered without asking even a single question about who they were and what they’d specifically done. It actually gives us a good idea of what the kings during Bible times were like and what kind of power they had. It’s really scary and I am glad we don’t live in that kind of world anymore. No one was going to stop Haman and no one could because the order had come from the ring of the King and the laws of ancient Persia were permanent. That means you couldn’t just take them back if you made a bad decision. In America, we have had all sorts of terribly wicked laws but we can also get rid of them if we want to. Slavery was legal once, as horrible as it was, and people even used the Bible to say it was okay. Brave men and women fought against slavery in a lot of different ways and now it is illegal—you can’t own someone and call it okay anymore. But when King Ahasuerus ruled over the entire Persian Empire, no one could stop his laws—not even him. That should have made him realize that giving the ring that could make laws to anyone else was unbelievably foolish, because it couldn’t be taken back. But for the third time in this story, the King listened to all the wrong people and made really bad decisions without really taking the time to think about it. Other people kept paying a terrible price for his bad decisions and bad advisors. Ahasuerus just kept on proving he was a really bad king.
When the law was published, all of the Jews were in a panic. What could they do? Where could they go? They were stuck and they were going to die in eleven months. They couldn’t even escape to Israel or Egypt because the Jews there were going to be killed by their neighbors too! Mordecai must have realized right away the terrible cost of his decision not to bow down before Haman. I wonder if he thought about the fact that he had done exactly what he told Esther not to do. As a man, Haman wore tassels on his clothes that told the world he was a Jew, and so whatever he did in the open reflected on every single Jew. He wanted Esther to hide her true identity, probably to protect her people from harm if the king got angry at her the way he did with Queen Vashti. Queen Vashti was probably raised as a princess and couldn’t be killed without starting a war but Esther was a nobody with no one to protect her. She had to be careful for her own sake and for the sake of every Jew. When Esther found out that Mordecai was dressed in rags and crying out and covered in ashes, she was very worried and sent people to him to find out what was wrong. As Queen, Esther was pretty much a prisoner in the Palace and couldn’t get any news that wasn’t brought to her. Because no one knew she was a Jew, probably no one even thought to tell her about the new law sentencing all Jews to death. Mordecai told Esther everything that had happened and told her that it was her job as Queen to save her people, even if it got her killed.
Esther wasn’t allowed to go and visit her husband, the King, and if she went without being invited he could have her killed on the spot. Just think about that for a minute and how messed up that is—a woman can’t see her husband unless it is his idea. Just because he is the king. Can you imagine like maybe your grandma going into the living room to see your grandpa and your grandpa getting angry and killing her right then and there. That is silly to think of now, of course, but it wasn’t silly for Esther—it was scary and she didn’t want to do it. But three days later, she went to see the King anyway, and he didn’t kill her. She invited the King and Haman to a great feast and of course, Haman was thrilled to go eat with the Queen. Most people never even got to see her. At the end of the feast, she asked them to come back the next day for another feast. Even though she had gotten away with coming to see him, she was being very careful.
Obviously, the wicked villain Haman was having the best day ever but when Mordecai still refused to bow down to him, he couldn’t stand to wait any longer. I mean, think about it, what reason did Mordecai have to bow down now? He literally had nothing to lose because no one could undo the law. Haman probably should have thought about that. It was ridiculous for him to still be angry. But he was angry enough to go home and complain about it to his family and friends, and they told him to have a gallows built so that Mordecai could be killed right away. Haman thought that was a great idea—he just had to get permission from the King first. I want you to think about how ridiculous Haman is—he is the second most powerful man in the world and he has gotten absolutely everything he wants, but he is so upset about one person refusing to bow to him that he wants to go wake up the King in the middle of the night.
But the King couldn’t sleep—I wonder if Esther fed him too much sweet rich foods. Maybe he was awake wondering what Esther wanted—she had promised to tell him tomorrow. And he came up with a really good idea, he wanted someone to read boring stuff to him. But what was read to him wasn’t boring at all, it was about Esther’s cousin Mordecai saving his life! And then the King figured out that no one had done anything to reward Mordecai so he needed to come up with some ideas. When he found out that Haman was in the palace, he told him that he wanted to honor someone. Haman was so proud that he assumed the King was talking about him! So, he like got out his bucket list of everything he could ever want complete with a parade and the King said, “Awesome, do all that for Mordecai—handle it yourself.”
Oh no. This was the WORST. Haman had to dress Mordecai in the King’s robes and put him on the King’s horse and give him a parade through the city telling everyone how awesome Mordecai is. It was the worst day ever. He barely got home in time to get back to Queen Esther’s feast. And then his day got even worse. Esther told her husband, the King, that she was a Jew and that Haman was going to kill her and her cousin Mordecai and everyone else. The King was so angry at Haman (I wonder if he realized it was mostly his own fault for giving him that ring and not asking any questions before agreeing to genocide—which is when you kill everyone in a group of people)–he was so angry that he stormed out and then Haman did something really, really dumb. He begged Queen Esther for mercy but when he did that, he fell on top of her and when the King came back, he assumed she was being attacked and ordered that Haman be killed right away. I guess if there was a story just about Haman we could call it Haman and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Haman went from being the second most powerful man in the whole world to being dead. All because he was so touchy about one guy in the entire Kingdom not bowing to him. Haman would have been better off just ignoring Mordecai.
Well, the King finally took his ring back from Haman and gave it to Mordecai instead, and gave Esther everything that belonged to Haman. I mean, it was a good move to give Mordecai the ring but he still doesn’t seem to have given it a lot of thought. He’s very impulsive, doing whatever makes sense in the moment. And we are definitely supposed to notice that, just like we are supposed to notice Haman’s wickedness and pride, and that Mordecai didn’t follow his own wise advice to Esther. Haman didn’t live long enough to learn his lesson, and the King seems to not be learning anything either, and Esther even had to go to him again and remind him that, yes, her people were still going to be slaughtered. Because it seems like he forgot. The King told them that he couldn’t undo the law but that they were free to make whatever new law they wanted. He still didn’t even want to check out what they were doing. I mean, what if they made a law to kill the king, right? Or to burn every tree in the Kingdom? People could do some messed up stuff with that ring. Fortunately, all Mordecai and Esther wanted to do was to save their people and so they wrote up a very simple law—the Jews were all allowed to fight back and kill whoever tried to kill them. Before this, they weren’t allowed to fight back.
By the time the twelfth month came along, Mordecai had become so powerful that many people joined the Jews in fighting back against the people who were still trying to kill them because the other law told them to. But the Jews won all their battles and were finally safe. And even though God is never mentioned in the entire story, how could any of this have turned out okay if He wasn’t behind the scenes making all the wrong things go right? Esther and Mordecai even created a holiday to celebrate and called it Purim. To this day, Jews celebrate how God worked to make sure His people survived. And if you ever celebrate it, remember that without Purim, there would be no Jesus because there would be no Jewish parents for him to be born to.