The Jews had achieved a frightful victory. In every land, the forces that had sought to eradicate them were uprooted. Having at the outset appeared beyond help and hope, the Jews had over the course of less than a year mustered the political and military strength to defeat some of the greatest men in the empire. By the end, the plan for their annihilation had been “turned on its head,” and “Mordechai the Jew was second to the king, seeking the good of his people” (9.25, 10.3). The Jews had positioned themselves to secure their own safety and to exert a decisive influence on the politics of Persia for years to come.

The book of Esther records the reaction of the Jews to the end of the nightmare. Feelings of relief and gladness contributed to the eruption of celebrations and feasts in every province in which Jews had been delivered from their enemies. Many Jews apparently expressed their joy even on this first occasion by sending gifts to one another, as a spontaneous response to the new gift of life they had all been given.

But it rapidly became evident that the events had a more profound significance than the immediate deliverance itself, and Mordechai and Esther moved to instate the victory as days of holiday in the annual cycle of Jewish festivals – to be “remembered and performed in each and every generation, in every family, in every province, in every city,” so that the days marking the ultimate effects of Haman's purim, the lots he cast in his attempt to seal the fate of the Jews, “will not fail from among the Jews, nor will their memory perish from among their descendants” (9.28). According to the narrative, Mordechai and Esther each send out a letter in the years subsequent to the events themselves, asking that the Jews observe the days on which the original celebrations had taken place as a festival, and giving legal force to practices that had been spontaneous among those delivered from death on the first Purim.

All of this is rather unusual for a biblical text. All of the other Jewish holidays that merit explicit imperatives in the Bible are already commanded in the books of Moses, many centuries before the events described in Esther.