Anger in the Book of Esther

Reading the Bible as literature

When I get angry, I experience a loss of control. My sense of personal agency is diminished, and I feel vulnerable and less powerful. Yet politicians and CEOs regularly use anger to project strength and conviction.

So, which is it? Does anger make us more powerful and capable of getting things done? Or does it make us less powerful and less effective?

There are Biblical passages that back up both interpretations of anger.

In this series of posts on anger, I will approach the Bible as literature. If you think the Bible is the inerrant word of God, or if you think the Bible is the biggest scam ever perpetrated, you can still read the Bible as a work of literature.

Prior posts in this series looked at insights on how to relate to anger from philosophy and psychology. Writers in these disciplines are explicit about their points of view. Religion, on the other hand, frequently transmits its messages through stories. To understand the religious insights contained in stories, we need to become skillful readers.

A plot device and some historical context for reading Esther

The Biblical book (or scroll) of Esther uses anger as a plot device.¹ With each appearance of anger, the plot takes a step forward.

In the 6^th century BCE, Israel suffered a military defeat and its people were exiled to Babylonia. God didn’t miraculously appear and rescue them. No plagues were visited upon the Babylonians. No seas were parted to bring the Israelites back to their land.

The people were subject to foreign rule. Many believed that God had abandoned them. The story of Esther takes place in Persia during this period.

Here are the places where anger, or its absence, plays a pivotal role in the story. It’s possible to see the story’s main components by isolating the moments when anger shows up. The numbers in parentheses refer to the chapter and verse I’m citing.

Anger in the book of Esther

The story begins with a Persian king asking the queen to appear before his guests wearing her crown. Some interpret this to mean wearing only her crown, i.e. naked. She refuses. This makes the king so angry that the queen is deposed (1:12).

When the king’s anger abates, he misses his queen (2:1-2). The king’s servants suggest that he get a new queen. Esther, a Jewish woman, becomes the new queen.

Two of the king’s servants become angry and plot to kill the king (2:21). Esther’s uncle Mordecai hears about the plan and tells Esther. Esther tells the king.

The king issues an order that everyone must bow to his chief advisor, Haman. Mordecai refuses to bow. This makes Haman angry (3:5). In response, Haman decides he will kill all the Jews.

Mordecai hears of Haman’s plan and tells Esther about it. Esther decides she will approach the king—even though visiting the king without being summoned is punishable by death (4:11). Luckily, the king doesn’t get angry when she visits him (5:2).² Esther requests that the king and Haman attend a banquet with her. The king grants her wish.

Haman gets angry when Mordecai once again refuses to bow down to him (5:9). Haman builds a tall gallows on which he plans to hang Mordecai.

The king and Haman attend the banquet with Esther. At the banquet, Esther asks the king to save her people from destruction. When the king asks who is plotting against her people, Esther names Haman. The king gets angry and storms out of the room (7:7).

The king decrees that Haman should be put to death on the gallows he had built for Mordecai. After Haman is hanged, the king is no longer angry (7:10).

Who gets angry?

The story of the Jewish people being threatened and then saved echoes the story of the Exodus from Egypt—a story that predates the book of Esther. In that story, God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” so he wouldn’t free the Israelite slaves.

In the book of Esther, God never appears.³ But as a reader, I sense that just as God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, the characters in Esther are being manipulated. Anger, or its conspicuous absence, alerts me to that manipulation. When anger appears, the characters lose agency and act in a way that serves Jewish interests.

With one exception.

The exception is Haman’s anger which led to his murderous plan. Yet without this plan, the Jews would never have experienced the redemption that comes at the end of the story. This repeats a trope from the Exodus story with Haman filling the Pharaoh role.

The king gets angry, the king’s servants get angry, and Haman gets angry. The Jewish characters, Mordecai and Esther, never get angry. Instead, they act with deliberation and courage. The result is that they, and the Jewish people whom they represent, emerge victorious.

Perhaps the plot device of anger is telling us that although God is never mentioned, God directly manipulated the characters’ emotions. Or maybe it’s making a moral point about the importance of managing our emotions well. Perhaps both. It’s up to the reader to decide.

Anger in the Bible

From the Esther story, it would be tempting to conclude that the Bible views anger negatively; that it recognizes how anger leads to diminished agency. This would corroborate how I experience my anger.

But the Bible isn’t a single book. It’s a collection of many books written over a long period.

Anger is complicated. And the various depictions of anger in the Bible don’t fit into a single coherent view that can be easily described.

In the next installment of Not So Random Thoughts, we’ll see a different picture of anger in the Bible.

1. I first learned this from Eliezer Segal’s 1989 article in Prooftexts volume 9, Human Anger and Divine Intervention in Esther

2. For those who enjoy a Freudian lens for literary interpretation, the text says that the king signaled his lack of anger at her visit “…by extending to Esther the golden scepter which he had in his hand, and Esther approached and touched the tip of the scepter.” (5:2)

3. Esther is one of two Biblical books in which God’s name is never mentioned. The other is Song of Songs. We have some record of the conversation deciding whether to include these two books in the Bible, so we know their inclusion was controversial.