The Gallows He Had Prepared

The king gets up and walks out. He is furious, and the book sends him into the palace garden and leaves him there for a verse, and it never tells us what he did out among the plants. Perhaps he needed air, and perhaps he could not decide.

Haman stays behind and begs Queen Esther for his life. The only person in the building who might save him is the woman whose execution he arranged. He knows enough by now to understand that the king has already decided something terrible about him, and he has nowhere else to go.

Then the king comes back in, and what he sees is Haman fallen across the couch where Esther is reclining.

Would he actually assault the queen while I am in the palace?

The king has just been told that his wife and her whole nation are under a death sentence, and the thing that brings the fury to the surface is a man too close to his couch in his own house. His concern arrives late and lands on the wrong outrage. As soon as the words are out, they cover Haman's face.

Then a servant speaks. He has one line in the whole book, and it decides everything.

There is a gallows fifty cubits high at Haman's house. He had it built for Mordecai, who gave the report that saved the king.

Harbonah is a eunuch attending the king. Nobody asked him. He knows about the gallows, he knows who it was built for, and he knows that Mordecai is the man who reported the assassination plot. The servants have been keeping track the whole time.

He puts the gallows and the rescued king into one sentence, so that his master hears in a single breath that the thing standing in Haman's yard was built for the man who saved his life.

Hang him on it!

They hang Haman on the gallows he prepared for Mordecai, and the fury of the king subsides. That is the whole ending. The rage that signed a decree without asking a question is settled by one execution, and the decree itself is still out there in every province with the date on it.