The Jews gathered themselves together in their cities throughout all the provinces of the king Ahasuerus, to lay hand on such as sought their hurt: and no man could withstand them; for the fear of them fell upon all people.
Ver. 2. The Jews gathered themselves together] They were laeti in Domino, sed non securi, cheerful in God, but not free from care, as Bernard hath it. They had prayed, but yet provided for the thirteenth of Adar, which by many was meant still to be a bloody day, notwithstanding the known favour of the king, and the patronage of Mordecai. The Hamanists would join together to perform that sentence, whereof the author repented and had rued it. (That old enmity, Genesis 3:15, will never out of the serpent's seed.) The Jews therefore well and wisely get together, and unite their forces, that they may make a powerful resistance. They are noted by Tacitus to be a nation at great unity among themselves, and to hate all others. One of the main scandals they do to this day take from Christians is their dissension, that mother of dissolution, as Nazianzen calleth it. The Turks pray to God to keep us still at variance, and say that their fingers shall sooner be all of one length than we be of one mind (Camer. Med. Histor. Cent. 2, c. 23). What a shame is this! If nothing else will, yet our common misery, and the hatred of our enemies, should unite us, as it did these exiles; and it was foretold by Jeremiah, Jeremiah 50:4, that Judah and Israel, that could not agree at other times, yet when they should be both in a weeping condition they should better agree. So did Basil and Eusebius against the Arians; Ridley and Hooper against the Papists, &c. And it is high time for us now to set aside our private emulations and exceptions; as the creatures in the ark laid by their antipathies within, because of the common danger of an inundation without.
To lay hand on such as sought their hurt] To repel force with force, to kill and spoil those that sought to do so to them. This nature promoted them to (as was forenoted), and they had also the king's warrant for it, and they kept themselves within compass thereof, by not meddling with any but only those that molested them. See Esther 8:11 .
And no man could withstand them] Tantum potest bona causa bonis usa consiliis et mediis, saith an interpreter here. A good cause, a good conscience, and a good courage, what cannot these three do where they meet? How should any stand before those who are Deo armati, strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might? Ephesians 6:10. Pilate's wife could warn him of meddling with such; and Haman's wife could tell him, that a Jew might fall before a Persian and get up again and prevail. But if a Persian, or whosoever of the Gentiles, begin to fall before a Jew, he can neither stand nor rise, Esther 6:13. There is an invisible hand of omnipotency that striketh in for his own, and confounds their opposites.
For the fear of them fell upon all the people] This was the work, not of some Pan Deus Arcadiae (as the heathens fancied); but of God, the sole giver of victory, who, when he pleaseth, affrighteth the Church s enemies, as he promiseth to do in many places. See Exodus 23:27 Deuteronomy 11:2; Deu 11:5 Jeremiah 46:27,28, &c. And as accordingly he did it on the Egyptians, Midianites, Philistines, Syrians, &c. And the like he did for Baldwin, king of Jerusalem, against the great caliph; for the Hussites, against all the force of Germany; for the Angrognians, against the pope's army that came against them. The soldiers told their captains they were so astonished they could not strike, and that the ministers, with their prayers, conjured and bewitched them (Acts and Men. 883). So at the siege of Mountabone, whensoever the people of God began to sing a psalm (as they usually did before their sallying forth) the enemies coming, acquainted with their practice, would so quake and tremble, crying, They come, they come, as though the wrath of God had been breaking out upon them (Spec. Bel. Sacr. 282). What was this handful of captives to the whole Persian empire, that they should now become no less formidable to them than not long after those few Grecians were to Xerxes? who, having covered the seas with his ships, and with a world of men passed over into Greece, was afterwards himself alone, in a small fishing boat, glad to get back into Asia, to save his own life (Herodotus).