When Kings Go Bad

 

It’s easy to identify the Persian king’s problem: he’s an alcoholic.

 

 When we first see him he is presiding over a huge banquet celebrating the third year of his ascension to the throne. Plenty of wine was on hand, served up in golden goblets, and the rule of the day was “No limits imposed,” that is, drink as much as you can.

 

His alcoholism is an ongoing theme, and as the drunken bouts go on, so does his recklessness. Someone who wants an audience with him—even his sweet, new bride—has to grease the skids with the promise of yet another bout of boozing, and when, on a certain night, “the king’s sleep was disturbed” (Esther 6:1)—presumably by a bad case of the DT’s—the best remedy is to have someone read to him from the official account of his recent doings, since that stuff is so boring it would put anyone to sleep.

 

But in pointing the finger at his alcoholism, we may lose sight of another, equally significant aspect of the king’s rule, its corruption. Anything anyone wants done can be arranged—if the price is right. Even a loyal courtier has to pay “ten thousand talents of silver” (Esther 3:9) for the privilege of ordering the annihilation all of the king’s Jewish subjects. Ideology really had nothing to do with it: it was all about keeping things running smoothly by greasing the skids with appropriate remuneration.

 

I’d like to imagine that he didn’t start out corrupt. When he was younger, he might have stood for all the right things, and been so eloquent, so savvy. Then, even after the change began, it might have begun slowly—a friendly bottle of champagne here or there, or some other harmless emolument. And in so doing, he would have been careful to work within the system, following all the official procedures and couching everything in legalese.

 

Here I can’t help mentioning a bit of philology. To modern Hebrew ears, the word dat means “religion.” But scholars know that this word is basically the Old Persian dāt, whose primary meaning was “law” or “statute.” It may therefore be significant that this loan-word occurs some seventeen times in various senses in the book of Esther, a somewhat surprising number in a relatively short narrative.

 

At any rate, as time went on, the king became less careful, and his leadership became increasingly erratic. He went from favoring the loyal courtier to having him executed, a turnaround that took only a few seconds. Our (almost) last glimpse shows him essentially abdicating common sense, giving in to the queen’s increasingly outrageous demands for revenge on an additional 75,000 real or imagined enemies.

 

Power, it is said, corrupts, and even when it is not absolute power, it is a pernicious danger in government, one that needs to be held in check by an alert populace.

 

Happy Purim!