Catholic Commentary
Haman Hanged on His Own Gallows
9Then Harbonah, one of the eunuchs who were with the king, said, “Behold, the gallows fifty cubits high, which Haman has made for Mordecai, who spoke good for the king, is standing at Haman’s house.” The king said, “Hang him on it!”10So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then the king’s wrath was pacified.
Esther 7:9–10 describes how a royal chamberlain reveals that Haman constructed a fifty-cubit gallows on his property to execute Mordecai, the king's benefactor. Haman is then hanged on that same gallows intended for Mordecai, and the king's anger is satisfied by this act of justice.
The gallows built for the innocent hangs the guilty instead—evil contains the seed of its own undoing.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
The Church Fathers and medieval exegetes consistently read Esther as a figure of the Church and of Mary interceding for humanity. Haman typifies the devil, the ancient enemy who sets his trap for the righteous and is instead caught in it. This pattern — the ensnarer ensnared — is a deep biblical topos. The gallows prepared for Mordecai and turned against Haman anticipates, in the typological imagination of the Fathers, the Cross: Satan, believing the death of Christ to be his victory, found the Cross to be the instrument of his own defeat. St. John Chrysostom and later exegetes saw in such reversals the characteristic signature of divine wisdom (sophia), which turns the weapons of the enemy against himself. The detail that Haman's instrument of death stood on his own property underscores personal culpability: evil contains within itself the seed of its own undoing.
Catholic tradition brings several distinctive lenses to this passage. First, the theology of divine providence. The Catechism teaches that "God is the sovereign master of his plan" and that he "can bring a good from the consequences of an evil" (CCC §312). The Book of Esther — notably in its Greek canonical form, which the Catholic Church accepts as deuterocanonical — is one of Scripture's richest illustrations of this truth. God's name does not appear explicitly in the Hebrew version of Esther, yet His hand is everywhere implied; providence works through the apparently random (Bugathan's timely disclosure, the king's sleeplessness in chapter 6, Esther's courage) to achieve a just end.
Second, the lex talionis redeemed. The principle that the punishment fits the crime (cf. Leviticus 24:19–20) is here not crude retribution but typologically rich justice. The Fathers, including Origen in his Homilies and St. Augustine in The City of God (Book XVIII), saw in such reversals God's governance of history, where the proud are scattered and the lowly exalted (cf. Luke 1:51–52).
Third, Haman as a type of the devil. The tradition from at least Origen onward — developed by St. Ambrose, the Glossa Ordinaria, and Rupert of Deutz — reads Haman's fall as a prefigurement of Satan's defeat through the Cross. The devil "prepared a gallows" for humanity in the garden; Christ, the new Mordecai and the new Adam, is vindicated, and the enemy is destroyed by the instrument he fashioned. This is the admirabile commercium — the wondrous exchange — seen through the lens of Hebrew narrative. Pope Benedict XVI, in Verbum Domini (§37), encouraged precisely this kind of typological reading as a legitimate and necessary dimension of Catholic exegesis.
Contemporary Catholics face moments when injustice appears not only triumphant but architecturally established — as permanent and towering as Haman's fifty-cubit gallows. Careers are damaged by calumny, families are torn apart by malice, the innocent suffer while the guilty seem untouched. This passage offers not a naive promise that all wrongs are righted immediately, but a structurally theological one: evil, by its own internal logic, tends toward self-destruction. The trap set for the righteous collapses on the trapper.
Practically, this passage invites the Catholic to resist the temptation to take justice into one's own hands (cf. Romans 12:19) and to trust instead in patient intercession — like Esther's — and in the workings of providence that often require waiting through the darkness of Esther 3–6 before the reversal of Esther 7. It also calls for the courage of Bugathan: speaking an inconvenient truth at the decisive moment. In a culture of complicity and silence, the chamberlain's brief disclosure changed everything. Catholics in professional, civic, and ecclesial life are sometimes that chamberlain — the one who knows, and must speak.
Commentary
Esther 7:9 — The Chamberlain's Disclosure
The name "Bugathan" (also rendered "Harbona" in the Hebrew tradition) appears almost providentially at this precise moment. Esther has just accused Haman before the king; Haman has thrown himself upon her couch in desperation; and before the king can even deliberate, a royal chamberlain volunteers the damning detail that Haman has already constructed a gallows fifty cubits high — approximately seventy-five feet — on his own property, intended for Mordecai, "who spoke concerning the king." This last phrase is quietly devastating. It reminds Ahasuerus that Mordecai is the very man who once saved the king's life by exposing the assassination plot (Esther 2:21–23), a service only recently recalled to the king's memory (Esther 6:1–3). Haman's crime is thus compounded: he plotted death against the king's own benefactor. The gallows' extraordinary height — visible across the city of Susa — was presumably designed for maximum public humiliation. Its spectacle was meant to terrorize the Jewish community. Instead, that same visibility becomes the measure of Haman's own disgrace.
The word "also" (Greek: καί) at the opening of verse 9 is significant in the Septuagint rendering. Haman's treachery against Esther is not an isolated incident but one thread in a pattern: he has also conspired against Mordecai, also threatened the whole people, also deceived the king. The word accumulates guilt.
Esther 7:10 — The Execution and the Abatement of Wrath
"So Haman was hanged on the gallows that had been prepared for Mordecai." The sentence is brief, almost spare, as if the narrator does not wish to linger. The justice is clean and complete. The same Hebrew root (tālāh, to hang) is used throughout the Esther narrative for both the threatened execution of Mordecai and the actual execution of Haman, binding the two fates together grammatically as they were bound together morally. What was prepared (kûn, to make ready, to establish) for an innocent man becomes, by divine governance of events, established against the guilty.
"Then the king's wrath was abated." The Hebrew (šākak) suggests a subsiding, as of floodwaters receding. This is not merely emotional resolution; it is the restoration of right order in the kingdom. Wrath — including righteous royal anger — has its proper end when justice is enacted. The narrative does not glorify vengeance but closes the moment when equity is achieved. Throughout the Book of Esther, the king's anger is a force that bends events (cf. Esther 1:12; 2:1; 7:7); here, for the first time, it bends toward the protection rather than the destruction of the innocent.