invitation.
The king and Haman dine with Esther that night, which gets Haman so excited that he decides to accelerate his plans to murder Mordechai, and he builds a scaffold in his back yard to do the job.
Chapter 6 is a sort of comic relief, where the king can’t sleep one night and gets it in his head that he’s being troubled because he never gave Mordechai his proper reward for warning him about the assassination plot.
Xerxes calls in Haman to ask for some advice as to how he should reward Mordechai. Haman meanwhile has completed his gallows and was about to go and lynch Mordechai. When Xerxes asks Haman what he should do to reward one of his most loyal servants, Haman assumes that Xerxes is talking about him, and he recommends very lavish treatment. So it is that Haman ends up having to walk around ahead of Mordechai, singing the praises of the man he wants to kill.
In chapter 7 everything comes unstuck for Haman at another dinner party with the queen. Esther tells Xerxes that Haman is trying to kill her and all her people. Haman is promptly hoisted on his own petard.
Chapters 8 & 9 outline Esther’s revenge. With the cooperation of Xerxes, she manages to not only have Haman hanged, but also all his children, with their bodies hung up on display afterwards. She then asks the king if her people might not go on their own killing spree against their enemies, and indeed, she manages to have the best part of 100,000 people killed over the space of only a couple of days, which is an enormous amount of bloodshed.
Chapter 10 concludes by telling us that this story is remembered each year at the feast of Purim, as indeed it is still