Esther 9:16

16. And had rest from their enemies The position of these words in the middle of the verse is noticeably strange. There maybe here some disarrangement of the text, or it may be, as Keil suggests, “that the narrator desired at once to point out how the matter ended.” Such apparent disorder of the text is not always to be regarded as evidence of corruption by transcribers. The Hebrew writers are not always the best models of accuracy and perfection of literary style.

Seventy and five thousand “The slaughter of these seventy-five thousand shows,” says Wordsworth, “that a very large number of their heathen enemies, who had been exasperated against the Jews, had prepared themselves for an attack upon them; and that, presuming upon their own numbers and forces, as compared with the Jews, they assaulted them in order to destroy and despoil them, and to enrich themselves with their property; and that the Jews made a vigorous resistance, and, by the help of God, routed their assailants with a great discomfiture. The slaughter was not the consequence of a vindictive spirit in the Jews, but of the bitter animosity of their enemies; and it proves that the Jews would have been extinguished, (as Haman’s decree intended that they should be,) if God had not interfered to rescue them from destruction.”

The same writer also records the two following inferences from the history of this terrible slaughter: 1) “It shows the recklessness of human life, even of their own subjects, which then prevailed among the sovereigns of most celebrated nations of the Eastern world, and it displays the ruinous consequences which would have resulted to human civilization if Ahasuerus (Xerxes) had been victorious at Salamis. If Greece had not triumphed in that struggle with Asia, Oriental ruthlessness and Oriental polygamy might have become dominant in the West, and greater difficulties would have obstructed the progress of civilization and Christianity. The Book of Esther reveals to us that the hand of God wrought for the deliverance of mankind at the straits of Salamis, and on the banks of the Asopus, at Plataea, as well as for the preservation of the Jews in the provinces of Persia.” 2) “It also displays the unhappy consequences of that proud assumption of infallibility which was implied in the Medo-Persian maxim, that laws once enacted may never be repealed. Such a claim to the divine attribute of infallibility, whether it be made by Eastern potentates or Western pontiffs, shuts the door against repentance, and involves them in a perpetual necessity of erring, and is fraught with the most disastrous consequences to all who are under their sway.”