Ten Thousand Talents of Silver

Before Haman goes anywhere near the king, he casts lots. The book gives the foreign word for it, Pur, and then stops to translate it, which tells you the first readers needed the help. The lot falls on the twelfth month. Everything that follows is set in the first month, so whatever is coming has nearly a year to be interrupted, and that gap is where the rest of the story happens.

Then he goes in, and what he leaves out is the striking part.

There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among the peoples of every province of your kingdom.

A certain people, and he never gets any closer than that. What the king gets instead is a list of three: their laws are different from everyone else's, they do not obey the king's laws, and tolerating them is not in the king's best interest. The first would be true of half the empire. The second is the only one anybody could check, and Haman brings no case, no incident and no name. The third is not a fact at all. It is the decision he walked in wanting, dressed up as the last item on a list.

Then he puts money on the table. Ten thousand talents of silver, into the royal treasury, to pay the men who carry it out. He has worked out that this will cost something and has arrived ready to cover it.

The king asks nothing. Not who these people are, not which laws they broke, not when, not where, not who else knows. He takes the signet ring off his own finger and hands it over. That ring is how an order becomes law, and it is now in the hand of a man whose case rested on one unsupported sentence.

Keep your money. These people are given to you to do with them as you please.

It sounds generous. Waving away ten thousand talents is the gesture of a man who does not need to think about money, and here it means he has not thought about any of it. He is not buying anything and he is not selling anything. He is handing a people to somebody who asked for them, and moving on with his day.

The narrator does one thing the king does not. He tells us who Haman is. Son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, the enemy of the Jews. Everyone reading knows what has just been given away. The only man in the room who could stop it is the only one who does not.