Biblion Bible Commentary
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That Night the King Could Not Sleep
Esther 6:1-5
1 On that night, the king couldn’t sleep. He commanded the book of records of the chronicles to be brought, and they were read to the king. · WEB
The hinge of the whole book is an episode of insomnia, and the book reports it as flatly as it reports the weather.
On that night, the king couldn't sleep. Five words in English, and everything turns on them. The book gives no cause, and it gives no agent.
What he calls for is not music or wine but the book of records of the chronicles, which is the most tedious remedy available and exactly the one the story requires. And what is read to him is the entry filed four chapters earlier: Mordecai's report of the assassination plot Esther 2:22–23.
Verse 3 supplies the omission that has been waiting since then. What honor and dignity has been given to Mordecai for this? — and the answer is nothing has been done for him. The debt has been outstanding for years, unpaid, and it surfaces on this night.
Then the timing tightens past coincidence. Verse 4 has the king asking who is in the court — and Haman had come into the outer court at that hour, for the express purpose of speaking to the king about hanging Mordecai on the gallows that he had prepared for him.
So the man arriving to request an execution is admitted at the moment the king is looking for someone to advise him on an honor, and the intended victim is the subject of both errands.
The book says nothing about who arranged it. It reports a sleepless night, an archive, an unpaid debt, and a visitor at the door, and it lets the reader count. This is the passage that makes the book's method unmistakable: everything necessary happens, nothing supernatural is described, and no name is supplied for the arranging.
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