Sackcloth Before the Gate
1 Now when Mordecai found out all that was done, Mordecai tore his clothes and put on sackcloth with ashes, and went out into the middle of the city, and wailed loudly and bitterly. 2 He came even before the king’s gate, for no one is allowed inside the king’s gate clothed with sackcloth. 3 In every province, wherever the king’s commandment and his decree came, there was great mourning among the Jews, and fasting, and weeping, and wailing; and many lay in sackcloth and ashes. 4 Esther’s maidens and her eunuchs came and told her this, and the queen was exceedingly grieved. She sent clothing to Mordecai, to replace his sackcloth, but he didn’t receive it. 5 Then Esther called for Hathach, one of the king’s eunuchs, whom he had appointed to attend her, and commanded him to go to Mordecai, to find out what this was, and why it was. 6 So Hathach went out to Mordecai, to the city square which was before the king’s gate. 7 Mordecai told him of all that had happened to him, and the exact sum of the money that Haman had promised to pay to the king’s treasuries for the destruction of the Jews. 8 He also gave him the copy of the writing of the decree that was given out in Susa to destroy them, to show it to Esther, and to declare it to her, and to urge her to go in to the king to make supplication to him, and to make request before him for her people.
Mordecai mourns publicly to a point he cannot cross, and the queen's first response is to send clothes.
The grief is immediate and it is loud. Torn clothes, sackcloth, ashes, and wailing in the middle of the city — nothing private about it.
Verse 2 gives the limit, and it is the chapter's structural fact: he came even before the king's gate, for no one is allowed inside the king's gate clothed with sackcloth. The man who has a post at that gate Esther 2:19 cannot enter it while mourning. The empire will not look at grief, and the rule keeps the crisis outside the palace where the one person who could act cannot see it.
Verse 3 widens the scene to the provinces, and the response is fasting and weeping everywhere the decree arrived.
Then verse 4, and Esther's first reaction is one of the most human details in Scripture. Told that Mordecai is in sackcloth, she sent clothing to Mordecai, to replace his sackcloth. She does not yet know what has happened; she knows he is distressed and improperly dressed, and she tries to fix the visible problem. He refuses the clothes.
What follows is a relay through an intermediary, Hathach, because the two cannot meet. Mordecai supplies evidence rather than emotion: the exact sum Haman promised, and the copy of the writing of the decree.
And the request is specific: that she go in to the king to make supplication for her people. It is the first time in the book anyone asks Esther to be what her position makes her — and the next paragraph is her explaining why that is not simple.
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