The Tower and the Gallows: Haman, Pharaoh, and the Archetype Behind a Name

Two men are given the same kind of assignment: build something tall.

The first is told by his master to fire bricks of clay and raise a tower so high that its owner can climb up and look at the God of Moses. The second is told by his wife and his friends to put up a gallows fifty cubits high, so that a man who refused to bow to him can be hanged from it in the morning.

Both men are named Haman. One appears in the Quran, standing at Pharaoh’s side in Egypt. The other appears in the Book of Esther, standing at the Persian king’s side in Susa, many centuries later. Neither project is completed as intended. The gallows ends up holding its own builder, and the tower, in the Quran’s telling, ends in the same collapse as the man who ordered it.

Critics have long said this is a blunder: the Quran, they claim, lifted a Persian courtier out of the Book of Esther and dropped him into the wrong century and the wrong country. This article argues that the pairing is no accident at all. “Haman” is not being used as a biography. It is being used as a type: the name of the royal minister who turns a ruler’s pride into a state project against God’s people, and who is undone by his own scheme. Esther gave that type its name. The Quran, deliberately, puts the name where the type belongs.

Every Mention of Haman in the Quran

The name Hāmān (هَٰمَٰن) appears six times in the Quran, and every one of them is in a scene with Pharaoh and Moses. Here they are, with enough surrounding verses to see what is happening.

1. The Oppressed Are Raised, and the Powerful See What They Feared (28:5–8)

The first two mentions come in the opening of the story of Moses, in the middle of a promise to the weak.

28:5 We willed to compensate those who were oppressed on earth, and to turn them into leaders, and make them the inheritors. 28:6 And to establish them on earth, and to give Pharaoh, Hãmãn , and their troops a taste of their own medicine. 28:7 We inspired Moses’ mother: “Nurse him, and when you fear for his life, throw him into the river without fear or grief. We will return him to you, and will make him one of the messengers.” 28:8 Pharaoh’s family picked him up, only to have him lead the opposition and to be a source of grief for them. That is because Pharaoh, Hãmãn , and their troops were transgressors.

وَنُرِيدُ أَن نَّمُنَّ عَلَى ٱلَّذِينَ ٱسْتُضْعِفُوا۟ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ وَنَجْعَلَهُمْ أَئِمَّةً وَنَجْعَلَهُمُ ٱلْوَٰرِثِينَ

وَنُمَكِّنَ لَهُمْ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ وَنُرِىَ فِرْعَوْنَ وَهَٰمَٰنَ وَجُنُودَهُمَا مِنْهُم مَّا كَانُوا۟ يَحْذَرُونَ

وَأَوْحَيْنَآ إِلَىٰٓ أُمِّ مُوسَىٰٓ أَنْ أَرْضِعِيهِ فَإِذَا خِفْتِ عَلَيْهِ فَأَلْقِيهِ فِى ٱلْيَمِّ وَلَا تَخَافِى وَلَا تَحْزَنِىٓ إِنَّا رَآدُّوهُ إِلَيْكِ وَجَاعِلُوهُ مِنَ ٱلْمُرْسَلِينَ

فَٱلْتَقَطَهُۥٓ ءَالُ فِرْعَوْنَ لِيَكُونَ لَهُمْ عَدُوًّا وَحَزَنًا إِنَّ فِرْعَوْنَ وَهَٰمَٰنَ وَجُنُودَهُمَا كَانُوا۟ خَٰطِـِٔينَ

Two details are worth noticing. First, the verse says “what they were wary of” ( mā kānū yaḥdharūn ): the thing Pharaoh and Haman feared is exactly the thing their policy produces. Second, the Arabic for “their troops” is junūdahumā , which uses a dual pronoun. The troops belong to the two of them . Pharaoh and Haman are grammatically bound together as a pair.

2. The Tower (28:38 and 40:36–37)

The next two mentions are the only places Haman is addressed directly.

28:38 Pharaoh said, “O you elders, I have not known of any god for you other than me. Therefore, fire the adobe, O Hãmãn , in order to build a tower, that I may take a look at the god of Moses. I am sure that he is a liar.”

وَقَالَ فِرْعَوْنُ يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلْمَلَأُ مَا عَلِمْتُ لَكُم مِّنْ إِلَٰهٍ غَيْرِى فَأَوْقِدْ لِى يَٰهَٰمَٰنُ عَلَى ٱلطِّينِ فَٱجْعَل لِّى صَرْحًا لَّعَلِّىٓ أَطَّلِعُ إِلَىٰٓ إِلَٰهِ مُوسَىٰ وَإِنِّى لَأَظُنُّهُۥ مِنَ ٱلْكَٰذِبِينَ

40:36 Pharaoh said, “ O Hãmãn , build for me a high tower, that I may reach out and discover. 40:37 “I want to reach the heaven, and take a look at the god of Moses. I believe he is a liar.” Thus were the evil works of Pharaoh adorned in his eyes, and thus was he kept from following (the right) path. Pharaoh’s scheming was truly evil.

وَقَالَ فِرْعَوْنُ يَٰهَٰمَٰنُ ٱبْنِ لِى صَرْحًا لَّعَلِّىٓ أَبْلُغُ ٱلْأَسْبَٰبَ

أَسْبَٰبَ ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ فَأَطَّلِعَ إِلَىٰٓ إِلَٰهِ مُوسَىٰ وَإِنِّى لَأَظُنُّهُۥ كَٰذِبًا وَكَذَٰلِكَ زُيِّنَ لِفِرْعَوْنَ سُوٓءُ عَمَلِهِۦ وَصُدَّ عَنِ ٱلسَّبِيلِ وَمَا كَيْدُ فِرْعَوْنَ إِلَّا فِى تَبَابٍ

Notice that Haman never answers. He is not given a line of dialogue anywhere in the Quran. He is given an order, and the Quran moves on. Everything about him is function: he is the one who carries out .

3. The Cursed Company (29:39 and 40:23–24)

The last two mentions list Haman among those who rejected Moses.

29:39 Also Qãroon, Pharaoh, and Hãmãn ; Moses went to them with clear signs. But they continued to commit tyranny on earth. Consequently, they could not evade (the retribution).

وَقَٰرُونَ وَفِرْعَوْنَ وَهَٰمَٰنَ وَلَقَدْ جَآءَهُم مُّوسَىٰ بِٱلْبَيِّنَٰتِ فَٱسْتَكْبَرُوا۟ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ وَمَا كَانُوا۟ سَٰبِقِينَ

40:23 We sent Moses with our signs and a profound authority. 40:24 To Pharaoh, Hãmãn , and Qãroon. But they said, “A magician; a liar.”

وَلَقَدْ أَرْسَلْنَا مُوسَىٰ بِـَٔايَٰتِنَا وَسُلْطَٰنٍ مُّبِينٍ

إِلَىٰ فِرْعَوْنَ وَهَٰمَٰنَ وَقَٰرُونَ فَقَالُوا۟ سَٰحِرٌ كَذَّابٌ

The Six at a Glance

Put together, the Quran’s Haman has a very specific profile. He is always at Pharaoh’s side. He is the second name, never the first. He is the one given orders to build. He shares Pharaoh’s guilt and Pharaoh’s fate. And his name appears at the two moments the Quran cares about most: when the oppressed are promised a reversal (28:6), and when the tyrant decides to challenge heaven by construction (28:38, 40:36).

The Objection

Since the nineteenth century, some Western scholars have argued that this is an error. The reasoning goes like this: the only Haman in the Bible is the villain of the Book of Esther, a courtier of the Persian king Ahasuerus (Xerxes), who lived around a thousand years after the time of Moses. The Quran puts a “Haman” in Egypt. Therefore, the Quran has confused two stories.

This is a fair objection, and it deserves a fair answer. To answer it, we first have to understand the Haman it points to, because he turns out to be a stranger figure than most people realize.

Haman in the Book of Esther

A Quick Primer

The Book of Esther is set in the Persian capital of Susa. King Ahasuerus promotes a man named Haman above all the other nobles:

“After these things King Ahasuerus promoted Haman the Agagite, the son of Hammedatha, and advanced him and set his chair above all the princes who were with him.” (Esther 3:1, RSV)

When Mordecai, a Jew, refuses to bow to him, Haman is enraged, and decides that punishing one man is too small a revenge. He goes to the king with an accusation against an entire people:

“There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom; their laws are different from those of every other people, and they do not keep the king’s laws, so that it is not for the king’s profit to tolerate them.” (Esther 3:8, RSV)

The result is a royal decree:

“Letters were sent by couriers to all the king’s provinces, with instruction to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate all Jews, young and old, women and children, in one day.” (Esther 3:13, RSV)

Haman’s household suggests the means for dealing with Mordecai personally:

“Let a gallows fifty cubits high be made, and in the morning tell the king to have Mordecai hanged upon it.” (Esther 5:14, RSV)

Then the story turns. Queen Esther, who is secretly Jewish, exposes Haman’s plot to the king, and the king’s anger falls on his own minister:

“So they hanged Haman on the gallows which he had prepared for Mordecai; then the anger of the king abated.” (Esther 7:10, RSV)

(The Hebrew verb tālâ can mean “hang” or “impale,” which is why some translations say “impaled.” The word for the structure is ʿēṣ , “tree” or “wood.”) The book describes the whole turn of events with a single memorable phrase: “the reverse occurred” (Esther 9:1, RSV), in Hebrew wĕnahăpôk hû (וְנַהֲפוֹךְ הוּא). It is the hinge of the entire story, and it is the reason Purim is celebrated.

Haman Is Already an Archetype in Esther

The Book of Esther does not present Haman as simply a Persian official. It presents him as the latest member of a family of enemies.

His title is the first signal. Haman is called “the Agagite” (Esther 3:1). Agag was the king of the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:8), and the Amalekites were the first people to attack Israel after the exodus from Egypt. The Bible records that attack, and a permanent grudge to go with it:

“Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.” (Exodus 17:14, RSV)

“The LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.” (Exodus 17:16, RSV)

“You shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget.” (Deuteronomy 25:19, RSV)

The second verse is the one that matters most here. Amalek is defined as an enemy that recurs . Whoever carries the name is playing a role the Torah has already scripted.

The author of Esther then sets the stage to match. Mordecai’s genealogy names Kish, a Benjaminite (Esther 2:5), which is the name of King Saul’s father and the tribe Saul came from. Saul was the king who spared Agag instead of destroying him (1 Samuel 15). The book is signaling that the old failure in the wilderness story has produced a descendant who now threatens to finish what Amalek began.

So before the Quran says a word, Haman in Esther is already:

• a type , not just a person, an Agagite acting out Amalek’s role;
• tied directly to the Exodus story, since Amalek was the enemy at Rephidim;
• a figure whose label was understood as symbolic, since the Greek versions of Esther relabel him a “Macedonian” and Josephus calls him an Amalekite. The tag changes with the audience, and that only makes sense if the tag is carrying a meaning.

In other words, even inside the Bible, Haman is not a free-floating Persian. He is already an archetype, and the archetype is wired directly into the Exodus story.

A Book with a Complicated Past

The Book of Esther is unusual in several ways, and each one is relevant to how we think about Haman.

• God is never named in the Hebrew text. There is no prayer, no temple, no explicit miracle. Everything happens through coincidence, timing, and court politics.
• It was debated. The Talmud preserves a discussion about whether Esther was written with divine inspiration and whether it belonged among the sacred books at all (b. Megillah 7a).
• It is missing from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Fragments of every other book of the Hebrew Bible have turned up at Qumran. No copy of Esther has been found. An absence is not proof of rejection, but it fits with the sense that Esther’s status was not settled everywhere at once.
• Some early Christian lists omit it. Lists of canonical books by Melito of Sardis and by Athanasius, among others, leave Esther out or set it apart.
• The text exists in more than one form. Alongside the Hebrew (the Masoretic Text), there are two different Greek versions: the Septuagint and a shorter one called the Alpha Text. The Greek versions add roughly a hundred verses (the “Additions to Esther”) that explicitly name God and add prayers, and they change details of the story, including who Haman is.
• Haman’s identity is not fixed. In the Hebrew he is an “Agagite.” In the Greek additions he is called a “Macedonian” and elsewhere a “Bougaean.” Josephus, in the first century, calls him an Amalekite. So even the ancient readers of Esther were not sure how best to label him, and the label shifted with the audience.
• Purim shows up in the record early. The second book of Maccabees refers to “Mordecai’s day” (2 Maccabees 15:36), so the festival was known by the late second century BCE.

This tells us something important: the Haman of Esther was a figure whose details shifted across texts and traditions. He was already becoming a type before the Quran was revealed.

A Man History Never Met

No Persian inscription, no Greek historian, and no administrative tablet mentions Haman, Mordecai, Esther, or Vashti. The Greek historian Herodotus describes Xerxes’ queen as Amestris, not Esther. The book’s picture of 127 provinces from India to Ethiopia, and of a royal edict that cannot be revoked, fits the style of a storyteller more than a chancery. Many scholars consider Esther a historical novella: a story shaped by real Persian customs but written to carry a message, not to report events.

You do not have to agree with that reading to see the point. Even for people who believe Esther is a history, Haman is attested nowhere outside Esther. He is, as far as the evidence goes, a figure who exists only on the page of this one book.

Where Did the Name Come From?

Nobody knows. Scholars have proposed Persian and Elamite origins (an Elamite divine name, Humban, is a frequently mentioned candidate), but no etymology is secure. To a Hebrew ear, the name sounds like hāmôn (“tumult” or “multitude”). And it sounds like something else, which brings us to a clue from the rabbis.

The Talmud asks a playful question: where in the Torah is Haman? Its answer is in the Garden of Eden, in the question God asks Adam:

“Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (Genesis 3:11, RSV)

הֲמִן־הָעֵץ אֲשֶׁר צִוִּיתִיךָ לְבִלְתִּי אֲכָל־מִמֶּנּוּ אָכָלְתָּ

The Hebrew for “of the tree” is hămin ha-ʿēṣ . “Haman” and hămin sound alike, and ʿēṣ , “tree,” is the same word used for Haman’s gallows (b. Ḥullin 139b) . The Talmud runs the same game on the other names: Esther is hinted at in “I will hide ( aster ) my face,” and Mordecai in “flowing myrrh” ( mor dĕrôr ).

This is a pun, and it demonstrates how the rabbis themselves treated these names: as hooks on which meaning hangs. The names in Esther were already being read as symbols.

An Egyptian Haman?

A well-known argument, popularized by Maurice Bucaille and repeated widely, points out that a name “Haman” appears on a stele in a Vienna museum and is listed in a reference work on Egyptian names (Ranke) as “head of the stone-quarry workers.” Since a pharaoh might well ask the head of the stone workers to build a tower, the argument concludes that the Quran’s Haman is a real Egyptian official.

This claim is worth knowing about and honestly cannot be dismissed out of hand, but it has real problems. The Egyptian name in question is one of several names built from the falcon-god Hemen ( ḥmn ); it is not the bare name “Haman.” The first sound is an Egyptian ḥ , which is not the same letter as the Arabic h in Hāmān, though the difference blurs in later Coptic. And the claim that the stele dates to the time of Moses is asserted by those who make the argument, not demonstrated independently.

More importantly, this article does not depend on the question. Suppose some Egyptian official with a similar name did serve a pharaoh. That would not undo any of what follows, because the Quran’s Haman is not described like an Egyptian official at all. He is described like a type: the vizier, the executor, the builder of the scheme. The argument here is about why that name attached to that role in scripture, and that question has an answer whether or not a stele in Vienna contributes to it.

Not a Mix-Up

If the Quran simply confused Esther’s Persian courtier with Egypt, we would expect to see signs of the confusion. We do not.

1. The Quran imports nothing Persian. There is no Ahasuerus, no Susa, no Esther, no Mordecai, no Vashti, no lots, and no Purim. A writer who had muddled the two stories would have been likely to drag some of the furniture along. The Quran takes the name and nothing else.

2. Haman is always in the same place. All six mentions are in the Moses and Pharaoh story. He never appears in any other setting, and he never does anything an Esther-Haman would do: no decree, no gallows, no feast.

3. The Quran shows precise awareness of Egypt elsewhere. In the Joseph story (Sura 12), the ruler of Egypt is called al-malik , “the king.” In the Moses story, the ruler is called Fir’awn , Pharaoh. The Quran treats these as different rulers, which is exactly the kind of distinction a careless writer would miss.

4. The role matches, even though the setting does not. What the Quran keeps from the name “Haman” is the function : the second man, the executor, the one who turns the ruler’s pride into construction and policy. That is precisely the function of Esther’s Haman.

Mixing up two stories produces random errors. What we find here is selective, consistent, and purposeful. That is the pattern of an archetype.

How the Rabbis Read Haman

Jewish tradition, long before and alongside the Quran, treated Haman as the later and more extreme counterpart to Pharaoh. The clearest example is in Midrash Tanchuma on the Torah portion Emor (Buber recension, Emor 13), which strings together a chain of persecutors, each of whom thinks the one before was a fool.

The passage builds toward a dramatic point. The midrash has Esau explain why Cain was stupid (he killed Abel while their father was still alive and could have more children). Pharaoh then says Esau was stupid (for waiting for his father to die before killing Jacob). And then Haman speaks: Pharaoh, he says, “was stupid” for ordering that only the boys be thrown into the Nile and the girls be spared, since the girls grow up and marry and the nation multiplies through them. Haman’s solution is to correct the flaw. The midrash has him say that he will not act like that, and then quotes his decree from Esther 3:13: destroy them all, young and old, children and women, on a single day.

In the rabbis’ own imagination, Haman is not simply like Pharaoh. He is Pharaoh’s successor and improver . Pharaoh’s plan was half-measure; Haman’s will be total. Haman’s entire logic is a correction of Pharaoh.

A note on dates: Midrash Tanchuma was compiled in the centuries around the rise of Islam, so I am not claiming it as a source for the Quran. I am offering it as evidence that the connection between Pharaoh and Haman was natural to readers of these texts . Josephus in the first century already called Haman an Amalekite, tying him to the Exodus story. The Talmudic wordplay in Ḥullin 139b is earlier than the Quran and, as above, treats Haman as a name with symbolic resonance. The idea that Haman was Pharaoh’s counterpart was in the air.

Even in more recent Hasidic commentary, such as the Peri Tzadik on Purim, Haman continues to be read as a symbol (there, of appetite and bodily excess, tracing the idea back to the Garden). The tradition never stopped treating him as more than a man.

Pharaoh and Haman, Side by Side

Here is how the two pairs compare. On the left is the Quran’s scene; on the right, Esther’s.

The parallel is not that the plots are identical. It is that the two Hamans occupy the same slot in the same kind of story: a proud sovereign, a loyal minister who makes the sovereign’s pride operational, a people marked for destruction, and a reversal that lands on the minister first.