Esther 7:10 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai As the sentence was short, so the execution was speedy, and he that expected every one to do him reverence is now made an ignominious spectacle to the world on a gallows fifty cubits high: and himself is sacrificed to justice, who disdained that less than a whole nation should be sacrificed to his revenge. Thus does God resist the proud, and those whom he resists will find him irresistible! Thus did mischief return on the person that contrived it, and the wicked was snared in the work of his own hands. If he had not set up that gallows, the king probably would not have thought of ordering him to be hanged; but as he had unjustly prepared it for a good man, he was justly condemned to suffer on it himself. The enemies of God's church have often been thus taken in their own craftiness. In the morning, Haman designed himself for the robes, and Mordecai for the gallows: but the tables are now turned, and Mordecai has the crown and Haman the cross. The Lord is known by the judgments which he executeth. “I cannot pass over this wonderful harmony of providence,” says Josephus, (Antiq., 50:2, c. 6,) “without a remark upon the almighty power, and admirable justice of the wisdom of God; not only in bringing Haman to his deserved punishment, but in trapping him in the very snare which he had laid for another, and turning a malicious invention upon the head of the inventor.” Bishop Patrick observes, on this wonderful deliverance of the Jewish nation, that “though, in the whole, there was no extraordinary manifestation of God's power; no particular cause, or agent, which was in its working advanced above the ordinary pitch of nature; yet the contrivance, and suiting these ordinary agents appointed by God, is in itself more admirable than if the same end had been effected by means which were truly miraculous. That a king should not sleep, is no unusual thing, nor that he should solace his waking thoughts by hearing the annals of his own kingdom, or the journals of his own reign, read to him: but that he should be awake at that time, especially when Haman was watching to destroy the Jews, and that, in the chronicles of the kingdom, they should light on that place where Mordecai's unrewarded services were recorded; that the king should resolve, thereupon, forthwith to do him honour; that Haman should come in at the very moment when he was so disposed; should ignorantly determine what honour should be done him, and be himself appointed to that ungrateful office: all this, no doubt, was from the Keeper of Israel, who neither slumbereth nor sleepeth, and was truly marvellous in his people's eyes.” See Dodd.