So That It Cannot Be Repealed

The king has been refused, and he does what a certain sort of man does when he has been embarrassed in front of everybody who works for him. He calls a meeting. In come the wise men who knew the times, the experts in law and justice, because conferring with them was his custom. The seven who advise him most closely are named for us: Carshena, Shethar, Admatha, Tarshish, Meres, Marsena and Memucan. This book keeps count of who was in the room.

The question he puts to them is what should be done with Queen Vashti, according to law, since she refused to obey the command of King Xerxes. He is asking for a legal ruling on his wife declining to come to a party. Nobody present is recorded as questioning whether this is a matter for the law.

Memucan answers, and his answer grows while he is speaking it. Vashti has wronged not the king alone, he says, but every prince and every people in the provinces. One woman stayed in her own room, and by the end of a sentence the injury covers a hundred and twenty-seven provinces. Then he lets slip what is bothering him.

For the conduct of the queen will become known to all women, causing them to despise their husbands.

The king's dignity was the stated problem. Memucan's own is the real one. He goes on about the noble women of Persia and Media hearing the news that very day and repeating it to the king's officials, with contempt and wrath to follow. He has taken one evening in one marriage and made it a national emergency, and he does it standing in front of the king. Then comes his remedy, and the remedy arrives with a clause attached.

let him issue a royal decree, and let it be recorded in the laws of Persia and Media so that it cannot be repealed

A law nobody can undo, drafted to keep one woman permanently out of one room. It will come back in the worst way available, because a decree that cannot be reversed serves a slaughter every bit as well as it serves a grudge. Vashti's position goes to a woman better than she, the princes are pleased, and the king does as Memucan says.

So the couriers go out, to every province in its own script and to every people in their own language, carrying the news,

proclaiming that every man should be master of his own household.

An empire sends letters in every script it has, announcing that men should be in charge at home. Nobody in the chapter laughs. They agreed, they wrote it down, they sent it, and the law stood, which is what makes the whole scene frightening rather than funny.