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Context No. 811 of 4322 · Esther (Greek)

Context · Reflection

Esther (Greek) 3:1-6: in context

1After this, King Ahasuerus highly honored Haman the son of Hammedatha, the Bugaean. He exalted him and set his seat above all his friends. 2All in the palace bowed down to him, for so the king had given orders to do; but Mordecai didn’t bow down to him. 3And they in the king’s palace said to Mordecai, “Mordecai, why do you transgress the commands of the king?” 4They questioned him daily, but he didn’t listen to them; so they reported to Haman that Mordecai resisted the commands of the king; and Mordecai had shown to them that he was a Jew. 5When Haman understood that Mordecai didn’t bow down to him, he was greatly enraged, 6and plotted to utterly destroy all the Jews who were under the rule of Ahasuerus.

The king promotes Haman above all his officials and commands everyone in the palace gate to bow down to him, and everyone does, except one man. Mordecai the Jew will not bow. Day after day the other officials press him about it, why do you disobey the king's command, and he will not budge, and eventually he tells them why: he is a Jew, and he will not give this man the honor being demanded. When they report it to Haman, and Haman sees for himself that Mordecai will not bow, he is filled with rage. And then comes the sentence that reveals what kind of man he is. He decides that killing Mordecai alone is too small. He sets out to destroy every Jew in the entire empire.

Look at the distance between the offense and the response. One man declined to bow. And Haman's wounded vanity does not want a proportionate satisfaction, an apology, a punishment, Mordecai's removal. It wants the annihilation of Mordecai's entire people, scattered across a hundred and twenty-seven provinces. This is what injured pride does when nothing checks it. It cannot tolerate even a single withheld honor, and it swells, out of all proportion, into a hunger to destroy far more than the thing that wounded it. A man who could not bear one person's refusal to flatter him talks himself, within a few verses, into genocide. The scale of the intended revenge is the exact measure of how small and starving the ego behind it really is.

One man would not bow, and Haman's pride reached for the destruction of a whole people. When someone withholds the honor or agreement I wanted, how far out of proportion does my urge to retaliate run?

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