Esther 5

“I’ll give you half the kingdom” was a figure of speech, not necessarily a literal promise. It’s a little like saying, “I’d give a million bucks for a cup of cold buttermilk.” Maybe not buttermilk, but we could fill in the blank with something.

Esther almost seems on the verge of telling the king what she wants. But she hesitates and perhaps needs a little more time to build the courage.

Twenty-three meters. That’s the height of a seven-story building, which was higher than Persian palaces. Some scholars say this sounds like another exaggeration in what was perhaps a fictional story intended to teach life lessons.

The Hebrew word is tala. I can mean to hang or to impale or to expose to the elements of Mother Nature. Persians, like Assyrians and Babylonians before them, executed people in creatively painful and vicious ways. Impaling was especially popular and showed up in battlefield pictures displayed on Assyrian palace walls. Executioners sometimes impaled people through the bottom of the torso and sometimes through the stomach or the chest. Death usually followed quickly. A skilled executioner could sometimes impale a person in ways that produced a lingering death.