Esther's coup succeeds in deposing the vizier and placing her cousin at the top of the Persian government. But it does not save the Jews. Indeed, in her principal mission, convincing the king to allow the Jews to escape his decree with their lives, she has failed completely.

It is true that Esther does approach Ahashverosh at her second banquet with the demand that she and her people be saved from Haman. But the king's reaction has nothing to do with the Jews – for whom, to judge by his original complicity in having them all murdered, he would appear to care very little. When he responds to Esther's plea by asking, “Who would presume to do so?” he is referring not to the annihilation of the Jews, but to the threat to the queen. It is the protection of the queen that is, after all, an issue of immediate, burning interest to Ahashverosh. The rest of the Jews, and even the fact of Esther's being a Jewess, appear hardly to scrape his consciousness.

And so things stand for quite a long while. After Haman is hanged and his duties as vizier have been transferred to Mordechai, the king goes back to ignoring the impending destruction of the Jews, just as if Esther had never broached the issue with him. The king's anger over the threat to himself and his household has been appeased by Haman's death, and with this the case is closed. It is not even clear that he heard the second part of Esther's plea: that her people be delivered.

A month goes by, and then a second. Yet the decree of destruction against the Jews remains in force, unchanged. The king is immersed in the business of making order in a politics that has been convulsed by two swift changes in government, and Mordechai finds himself with the pressing and ponderous concern of making a responsible impression in his new post.