Commentaria in Esther
Chapter the Seventh. Synopsis of the chapter
Esther begs life for herself and the Jews, and accuses Aman, whom the king immediately orders to be hanged on the gibbet which he had erected for Mardochai.
1. So the king and Aman went in to drink with the queen. 2. And the king said to her again the second day, when he was warm with wine: What is thy petition, Esther, that it may be granted thee? and what wilt thou have done? although thou ask the half of my kingdom, thou shalt obtain it. 3. She answered him: If I have found favour in thy eyes, O king, and if it please thee, give me my life, for which I ask, and my people, for which I beseech thee. 4. For we are delivered, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and to perish. And would God we were sold for bondmen and bondwomen: the evil might be borne, and I would have mourned in silence; but now our enemy is one whose cruelty redounds upon the king. 5. And king Ahasuerus answering said: Who is this, and of what power, that he should do these things? 6. And Esther said: It is this Aman that is our most wicked enemy and adversary. And he hearing this, was immediately struck dumb, not able to bear the countenance of the king and the queen. 7. But the king, in anger rose up, and went from the place of the banquet into the garden set with trees. Aman also rose up to entreat Esther the queen for his life; for he understood that evil was prepared for him by the king. 8. And when the king returned out of the garden planted with trees, and came into the place of the banquet, he found that Aman was fallen upon the bed on which Esther lay, and he said: He will force the queen also, in my presence, in my own house. The word was not yet gone out of the king’s mouth, and immediately they covered his face. 9. And Harbona, one of the eunuchs that stood waiting on the king, said: Behold the gibbet which he had prepared for Mardochai, who spoke for the king, standeth in Aman’s house, fifty cubits high. And the king said to him: Hang him upon it. 10. So Aman was hanged on the gibbet which he had prepared for Mardochai: and the king’s wrath ceased.
2. When he was warm with wine.—For Darius was a great drinker of wine. Hence on his tomb was inscribed this elogium: “I can drink much wine and bear it well,” according to Athenaeus, book X. The same Cyrus the younger also proclaimed of him, as Plutarch mentions in Artaxerxes. “King Cambyses,” as Seneca writes, book III On Anger, chapter xiv, “being too much given to wine, Prexaspes, one of his dearest friends, warned to drink more sparingly, saying that drunkenness is shameful in a King, whom the eyes and ears of all follow. To this he replied: That you may know how I never fail myself, I will prove now that after wine my eyes are in their duty and my hands. Then he drank more freely than at other times, and from larger cups; and already heavy and drunk, he ordered the son of his reprover to go beyond the threshold and stand with his left hand raised above his head. Then he bent his bow, and pierced the very heart of the youth (for that, he had said, he aimed at), and cutting open the breast, showed the arrow sticking in the very heart; and looking at the father, asked whether he had a steady enough hand. But he said that Apollo could not have shot more surely. May the gods ruin him badly, in mind and still more in condition.” So far Seneca.
3. Give me my life,—that is, my life. Sharp was this dart with which Esther struck Ahasuerus, and more Aman, as if to say: This Aman by fraud has obtained from thee to kill all the Jews; wherefore I too, who am a Jewess, am to be killed by him, and so thou wilt be deprived of me as queen, and of my bed, which thou hast so greatly desired and desirest. Not so much against me, then, as against thee, O Ahasuerus my king and husband, is this Aman injurious and violent, as well as crafty and fraudulent.
4. And would God we were sold for bondmen and bondwomen,—that, our lives being spared, we might at least serve the King and the Persians as slaves and handmaids!
But now our enemy is one (who wills to rob me and the Jews and all of life), whose cruelty redounds upon the king,—both because by his edict of death for the Jews, who enrich his treasury with huge tributes, and render the king very many services, and from whom he can enlist many strong soldiers for his own and the kingdom’s defence; nay, whom he can set as wise men over his provinces, as Daniel with his three companions was set. Of these, I say, and of very many advantages which thou, Ahasuerus, receivest from the Jews, and canst receive greater, Aman deprives thee. The same brings upon thee grave and lasting infamy among all nations, in that thou utterly exterminatest a nation innocent, nay deserving well of thee. On thee, therefore, above all, redounds the cruelty of Aman seeking the extermination of the Jews.
6. And Esther said: It is this Aman that is our most wicked enemy and adversary.
It is this Aman that is our most wicked enemy.—Note here the magnanimity of Esther, who accuses Aman not absent and in secret, as timid and mean little women do, but present and openly before Ahasuerus, that he may know the accusation to be sincere and true, which Aman cannot deny: whence by this unexpected accusation, as if struck by lightning, Aman was stupefied and struck dumb. Let princes learn from Esther not to fear the power and insolence of the great, but to press and tread upon it. This is the part of kings. Truly Seneca in Hercules Furens:
The first art of reigning is to be able to bear envy. And in Oedipus: He who fears hatred too much knows not how to reign. And in the Thebais:
Together the God, maker of the world, set these, hatred and kingship.
8. He found Aman fallen upon the bed (not a night bed for sleep, but a banqueting couch, on which they reclined at table) on which Esther lay,—that, a suppliant, rolling at her knees, he might beg her to grant him his life. Hence St. Athanasius in the Synopsis: “Aman,” he says, “when he saw the king afflicted with grief and moved to wrath on account of the unworthy deed against the Jews, in his absence besought the queen, falling at her knees. The king, entering and seeing Aman touch the queen’s knees, suspecting that he did it for lewdness, ordered him to be hanged on a gibbet,” etc. Severus Sulpicius relates the same: “Then,” he says, “the king returning saw Aman embracing the knees of the Queen.” For of old suppliants held the knees of him to whom they made supplication, as the seat of mercy, and that for four reasons which I recounted at length on Exodus iv, 45.
And he said (the King): He will force the queen also, in my presence.—The king said this partly from anger, partly from jealousy, with which he doted on Esther; for that is suspicious of evil and of rivals, even where in fact there is nothing of the kind, as in Aman here there was nothing. He suspects, therefore, that Aman wishes to ravish Esther, that is, to do violence not so much to her life as to her chastity, enticed by her extraordinary beauty, as Ahasuerus felt himself enticed by the same.
And immediately they covered his face.—So they did to one with whom the king was offended, as to one unworthy to see the royal face, and lest the king, seeing a face hateful to him, be moved to greater wrath and indignation. Again they covered Aman’s face as that of one guilty of death and condemned to punishment. So Lyranus; for the condemned were led to death with eyes veiled, lest seeing their country, citizens, friends, children, wives, they should die not once but seven times. So now the eyes of the guilty to be beheaded are veiled, lest they see the sword brandished at their neck, and so be terrified and by falling avoid and frustrate the stroke of the sword. Hence that deadly sentence of the ancient Roman Judges against the guilty in Livy and Cicero: “Go, lictor, bind his hands, veil his head, scourge him, hang him on the unlucky tree (the cross).”
9. And Harbona said: Behold the gibbet which he had prepared for Mardochai, who spoke for the king,—namely for the king’s safety, discovering to him the plot of the conspirators. Harbona was a eunuch, who, sent by the king to summon Aman to go with him to the banquet of Esther, on entering Aman’s house saw and understood that Aman had erected this for Mardochai; hence he here denounces it to the king, seeing the king offended with him, and, as seems, himself hostile to Aman for his pride, and wishing him removed and hanged.
10. So Aman was hanged,—not in his house, but at the gate of the city of Susa, as is said in chapter xvi, verse 18. For thither the gibbet was transferred from Aman’s house, to his greater ignominy, that to all entering and leaving the city he, now hanged, might be a spectacle and a mockery, who a little before was adored by all as a god. Gretser, book I On the Cross, chapter xix, suspects that Aman was fastened to the cross with nails; others, by a noose cast about the neck, as is now done; nothing certain on this matter. This is certain, that this cross was 50 cubits high, so that he who are lifted on high, that they may fall with heavier ruin.
Fourth and properly, how the evil which one devises unjustly against another is rolled back upon the deviser, and by the just judgment of God falls upon his own head. For the cross prepared for Mardochai was given to Aman who prepared it. Examples follow.
Phalaris threw into the bull Perillus, who suggested to him that he should torture the guilty in a brazen bull with fire put beneath, that he might delight his ears with their bellowing; of whom Ovid, book I On the Art of Love:
And Phalaris roasted in the bull the limbs of cruel Perillus: the hapless author tasted his own work.
He adds the example of Busiris, who sacrificed Thrasius himself, who suggested that he should sacrifice his guests to Jupiter to obtain rain;
Thou shalt be the first victim of Jove, he says, and thou, a guest, shalt give rain to Egypt.
Whence he concludes with this epiphonema:
For there is no juster law than that the authors of death perish by their own art.
Finally see here how great is the deceit of the world. Hence St. Bernard rightly exclaims, epistle 107: “O wicked world, which dost so bless thy friends alone as to make them enemies of God. Aman found favour with king Ahasuerus; this favour begot for him a cross. Achitophel found favour with Absalom; this brought him a hanging.” And St. Augustine, epistle 144 to Anastasius: “This world,” he says, “is more dangerous when it flatters than when it troubles, and is more to be guarded against when it makes itself loved than when it warns and forces us to despise it.” So we see that those who are great with princes gradually decline, as Sejanus fell, Achitophel, Aman, Joab, and very many others. He who is wise, therefore, will betimes, before the fall, withdraw himself from the court,