Spying in the Bible 22 - 483 BC to 404 BC

Esther

The Biblical book of Esther begins in the third year of Xerxes’ reign, in c. 483 BC, when he gave a banquet in honor of himself. At the time, Xerxes ruled the Achaemenid Empire, which was the largest, most powerful empire in the world. During the banquet, while he was drunk, Xerxes asked for his wife, the Queen, to present herself so he could show her off to his guests. She refused him and so he banished her to make a statement to his empire that everyone must obey him and that wives must obey their husbands. Josephus explains that the queen refused him because of a Persian law that she should not be seen by strangers. Shortly after that, Xerxes went off to war with the Greeks, which included the famous Battle of Thermopylae, where three hundred Spartans lead by King Leonides resisted the entire Persian army.

When Xerxes returned home from war, he remembered that he still needed a new wife for queen, so he had the most beautiful virgin women in the empire gathered together and undergo a year of beauty treatments. At the end of that time, the woman he chooses to marry is Esther. Esther was a Jewish orphan who was raised by her cousin Mordecai. Their family had been among the Jews taken to Babylon when Nebuchadnezzar exiled the Jews from Jerusalem. Mordecai had told Esther to keep her heritage a secret while at the palace, which she did. To keep track of his cousin, whom he thought of as his adopted daughter, Mordecai sat at the king’s gate every day to get news of her. One day, while he was sitting at the gate, he found out about two officials who guarded the king’s gate who planned to assassinate Xerxes (Esther 2:21-23a).

During the time Mordecai was sitting at the king’s gate, Bigthana and Teresh, two of the king’s officers who guarded the doorway, became angry and conspired to assassinate King Xerxes. But Mordecai found out about the plot and told Queen Esther, who in turn reported it to the king, giving credit to Mordecai. And when the report was investigated and found to be true, the two officials were impaled on poles.

Sometime later, in c. 474 BC, Xerxes made a decree that everyone should bow to Haman, his highest official, to show him honor and as a reward for his faithful service. However, Mordecai would not do it saying he bowed only to God, so Haman, with the king’s permission wrote an edict to kill all of the Jews to purge them from the land. Esther had still kept her ethnicity a secret, so she was safe from the decree and she had not even heard about it. However, she kept her attendants spying on Mordecai so that she could protect him, so when they reported to her that he was mourning the edict she sent a secret message to him asking what was wrong. (Esther 4:4-5).

When Esther’s eunuchs and female attendants came and told her about Mordecai, she was in great distress. She sent clothes for him to put on instead of his sackcloth, but he would not accept them. Then Esther summoned Hathak, one of the king’s eunuchs assigned to attend her, and ordered him to find out what was troubling Mordecai and why.

This is the first Biblical incidence of spies being deployed to help their target, showing they have more uses than just getting information about an enemy before battle. Mordecai then sent a message back with these attendant-spies explaining the edict and asking Esther to intercede for her people to the king (Esther 4:6-8).

So Hathak went out to Mordecai in the open square of the city in front of the king’s gate. Mordecai told him everything that had happened to him, including the exact amount of money Haman had promised to pay into the royal treasury for the destruction of the Jews. He also gave him a copy of the text of the edict for their annihilation, which had been published in Susa, to show to Esther and explain it to her, and he told him to instruct her to go into the king’s presence to beg for mercy and plead with him for her people.

Esther agreed to help by persuading the king to rescind the decree. By doing so, she was risking her life because Xerxes had instituted a law that no one could legally come to him without being summoned and the penalty for doing so was death unless he pardoned them by extending his golden scepter. To not anger him, Esther went to the king to invite him and Haman to a banquet with her. They went and she requested that they do it again the next day. Haman was honored, but could not enjoy the honor while Mordecai was alive and not honoring him, so he set up a pole to impale Mordecai on and was going to ask for the king’s permission to do so at the banquet the next day.

That night the king could not sleep, so he ordered that the book with the record of his reign be read to him. When he was read about how Mordecai had uncovered the plot against him and saved him, Xerxes realized he had never given Mordecai a reward. Xerxes did so the next day and honored Mordecai in front of everyone. That evening at the banquet Esther told Xerxes that she was a Jew and asked him to save her and her people from Haman’s edict. The king left in a rage and Haman knelt down on the couch where Esther was to beg for her mercy. When the king came back he thought Haman was molesting the queen since he was on the same couch as her. One of the eunuchs attending the king then told him that Haman had a pole set up to impale Mordecai, whom the king had just honored, so the king ordered that Haman be impaled on it instead and he rescinded the edict to kill the Jews. This deliverance of the Jews through Esther is known as Purim and in modern times is celebrated in February or March, before the Passover.

About ten years later, in c. 464 BC Xerxes was assassinated by Artabanus, the commander of the royal bodyguard and the most powerful official in the court at the time. This was more than a decade after the first assassination attempt by officials that Mordecai had stopped. It is unknown what became of Esther or Mordecai after Xerxes assasination. Artabanus had a plot to dethrone the Achamenids, but Artaxerxes, Xerxes second son ended up on the throne after his older brother and Artabanus had died in the intrigue. There are differing accounts of how and why the oldest son was involved. Some say Artabanus tricked Artaxerxes into thinking his older brother killed their father and so Artexerxes killed his both of them when he found out the truth. Other accounts say Artabanus killed the older brother when he tried to kill the whole family, but that Artaxerxes survived and killed him instead.

In any case, after Artaxerxes took the throne, he decreed that any Jew who wanted to return to Jerusalem could do so. He then delegated to the Jewish prophet Ezra the duty of taking care of the ecclesiastical and civil affairs of the Jews. Therefore, a group of five thousand Jews led by Ezra returned to Judah and began rebuilding the city and the walls of Jerusalem. The walls of Jerusalem were completed in c. 445 BC at which time Nehemiah held a convocation. Twenty years later, Artaxerxes died in and his oldest son Xerxes II took over for a month and a half until his younger brother killed him to take the throne. An illegitimate brother, Ochus, then rebelled against the youngest brother, killing him, taking the throne, and adopting the name Darius II to become king and reined until the end of the Peloponnesian War, in c. 404 BC. During his reign the last of the Old Testament prophets lived and the last of the books of the non-Apocryphal Old Testament books were written.