The Pulpit Commentary — Esther — Section 120

Ver. 1.-A sl,eepless monarch and a wakeful Providence. The place of this verse fully 'Vindicated by its contents. When its position is observed in the original it is found to be very nearly the bisection of the book. Certainly it is the critical point, the hinge on which the deep moral and religious interest of the history turns. There is a sense in which it might seem that up to this point the reader has but groped his way, He has asked for a little more distinctly religious light and speech. He craves to see a Divine presence, and to hear the accents of a Diviner voice than have been hitherto vouchsafed. Perhaps these are still with- held in their fullest manifestation, but it can no longer be felt that any vital element of evidence is absent. The night in question was the night between the two banquets of Esther, the night before the almost certainly foregone conclusion of permission to hang Mordecai on the new-made gallows of Haman. Everybody was not in the secret. Neither Esther, nor Mordecai, nor the king himself knew of the project. Yet from a merely human point of view it was all but certain. How the night passed for Esther and for Mordecai we know not. Both had to acknow- ledge distinguishing mercies which the preceding day had brought. But they both knew that one crisis happily passed did but usher in another, and if this should not issue as favourably, vain were the promise of the day before. Likely enough, then, the solemn hours of that night were counted by them with wakeful anxiousness. For what issues of life or death hung upon the next day. Haman's night invites not a solitary sympathy. This much we may surmise about it, that it was disturbed by the noise of those who "made the gallows" (eh. v. 14; vi. 4; vii. 9), and that its length was not prolonged over-far.into the morning. But the storm-centre travels toward the night of A.hasuerus, and there very soon it threateningly hangs. Ahasuerus was not a good man ; he was not a good king. How otherwise could he have permitted an insufferably vain, self-seeking minion like Haman to be such a welcome and close companion? How could he have committed to such a subject an authority so dangerously approaching his own? Yet, as we have before seen (eh. i. 4), there was a certain large lavish way about Aha6uerus-the outside of a certain kindliness, impulsiveness, unthinking trustingness within, which proved a heart not callous, These qualities did indeed harmonise well with what we read elsewhere of Xerxes, and how his feelings so overcame him when, from his throne of marble, he reviewed his innumerable troops crossing the Hellespont, and reflected upon human mortality. Ahasuerus was thoughtless and rash-the very things that cannot be defended in either king or man-but he was not yet abandoned of every higher presence ; he was not yet "let alone." As the word of God here· detains us to make special remark on the sleepless night of this king, and exhibits it ns the very crisis of the providential history under relation, let us note- I. SOME OF THE SIGNIFICANT FACTS GATHERING ROUND IT AS THE EXPERIENCE OF TIIE KlNG. 1, We observe, and with some surprise, that there seems not the slightest dispoHition on the part of the king, or of any one else, to attribute it to n physical c1J.use, 11or to minister to it any physical antidote. Neither the soporific of a drug or of driuking, nor the soothing of music, nor any diversion are offered to it. Nor Oil, VI, 1-14.] THE BOOK OF ES'fHER. 125