So they hanged Haman, &c.— I cannot pass over the wonderful harmony of Providence, says Josephus, Antiq. 50:11; 100:6 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 entrapping him in the very snare which he had laid for another, and turning a malicious invention upon the head of the inventor. Well says the heathen poet,
———Nec lex est justior ulla Quam necis artifices arte perire sua.
No law is more just, than that the workers of wickedness should perish by the means of their own subtilty.
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 of 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 lie awake at that time, especially when Haman was watching to destroy the Jews; that in the chronicles of the kingdom they should light on that place where Mordecai's unrewarded services were recorded; that the king should forthwith resolve thereupon 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.