There is one more important difference that the rabbis noticed and that the Quran’s own wording invites. Pharaoh’s decree, in the Bible, was aimed at boys:
“Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, ‘Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.'” (Exodus 1:22, RSV)
Haman’s decree, in Esther, is aimed at everyone: young and old, women and children, in one day (Esther 3:13). Even the language of the scattered, dispersed, and different people (Esther 3:8) echoes the way Pharaoh describes Israel in Exodus: a people “too many and too mighty for us” (Exodus 1:9, RSV), who might “join our enemies” and “escape from the land” (Exodus 1:10, RSV).
Same fear, same logic, same turn from a people’s presence to a people’s elimination. What Pharaoh does by degrees, Haman tries to do at a stroke. This is why the midrash can call Haman the one who learned from Pharaoh’s mistake. And it explains something about the Quran’s choice to list the two names as a pair. When the Quran says “Pharaoh, Haman, and their troops” (28:6, ), it is naming not two men but one project, with its leader and its escalation built into the pairing.
Now return to the opening image. In the Quran, Pharaoh commands Hāmān to fire clay and construct a ṣarḥ, a lofty structure, so that he might somehow reach the pathways of heaven and look toward the God of Moses:
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.”
That combination— fired clay, monumental construction, and a structure directed toward heaven—immediately recalls another scriptural tower:
“And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens.'” (Genesis 11:3–4, RSV)
The point is not that Egypt never used fired brick. It did. The stronger observation is literary. The Quranic scene combines Pharaoh’s defiance, Babel’s fired-brick ascent toward heaven, and Haman as the official who makes the ruler’s arrogance concrete. It is therefore not a simple retelling of any one earlier story, but something closer to a recombination of familiar scriptural motifs.
Once Esther is brought into view, another parallel emerges. In Esther, Haman also becomes associated with the construction of an enormous elevated structure. When he is enraged at Mordecai, his wife Zeresh and his friends advise:
“Let a gallows fifty cubits high be made…” (Esther 5:14, RSV)
The Hebrew term can refer more broadly to a wooden pole or structure, but the literary function is clear: Haman erects something extraordinarily high for the humiliation and death of the righteous man who refuses to submit to him. The Quran gives Haman a different high structure. Pharaoh commands him to build upward toward heaven in order to challenge the claim of Moses.
And there is something deeper in the contrast. The tower reaches up, toward God, to see if He is real. The gallows is built down, on the ground, to destroy a man. One is an act of pride against heaven; the other is an act of hatred against a neighbor. Together they sketch the whole career of the type: contempt for God and contempt for His people, two faces of one corruption.
The Quran sets this command beside a second one. The same imperative, ibni, “build!”, appears only once more in the singular, and it is spoken by another member of Pharaoh’s household. Pharaoh orders a man to build a tower toward heaven so that he can look at the God of Moses (40:36).
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.
Later, another person from Pharaoh’s own household uses the same words. Pharaoh’s wife says:
66:11 And GOD cites as an example of those who believed the wife of Pharaoh. She said, “My Lord, build a home for me at You in Paradise, and save me from Pharaoh and his works; save me from the transgressing people.”
The first builds upward to inspect God from a distance; the second asks to be housed near Him ( ʿindaka). One wants a structure to get above God, and the other wants a home to be beside Him. It is a small example of what the Quran does repeatedly, teaching by contrast, and it places Haman’s tower on the losing side of the pair.
Esther’s Haman has a wife too, and the Bible gives her the same verb pointed the other way. When Haman is furious at Mordecai, it is his wife Zeresh and his friends who say, “Let a gallows fifty cubits high be made” (Esther 5:14, RSV). Where Pharaoh’s wife asks God to build her a home beside Him, Zeresh helps build the instrument of a man’s death. She is not a simple villain; when Haman’s fortunes begin to turn, she warns him that he “will surely fall” before Mordecai (Esther 6:13, RSV). But it is the warning of a fatalist, not a believer, and the Jewish tradition remembers her accordingly: “cursed is Zeresh” is part of the Purim reading itself.
There is another subtle parallel here. In later Jewish interpretation, Haman’s corruption is described as an “evil eye”: he looks at Israel’s Sabbaths, festivals, eating and drinking, and sees something contemptible rather than holy. Quran 40:37 gives Pharaoh a similar failure of perception. He wants to look toward the God of Moses, yet in the very next breath the Quran says that “the evil of his deeds was made attractive in his eyes.” Haman looks at what is holy and sees evil; Pharaoh looks at his own evil and sees good. In both cases, the problem is not blindness but corrupted sight—reality seen upside down.
A Hypothesis Worth Testing: Esther as a Retelling of the Exodus
One further possibility needs to be flagged clearly as a hypothesis and not a conclusion.
Some readers have noticed that Esther is structured in a way that echoes the Exodus. A foreign king with absolute power. A court official who drives a plan to destroy an entire people. A decree that threatens annihilation. A Jew who has unexpected access to the ruler. A reversal. The destruction of the persecutors. A festival to remember the deliverance. Esther, on this reading, is a diaspora Exodus: the same story for a world in which miracles are no longer visible, where deliverance comes through coincidence, court politics, and courage rather than plagues and the parting of the sea.
There is a textual anchor for this: Haman’s accusation, “a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed” (Esther 3:8), echoes Pharaoh’s fear in Exodus 1:9–10, as shown above. But a fair account must also say that Esther echoes the Joseph story just as strongly: a Jew rises to be second only to the king, receives the royal ring, is robed and paraded through the city (compare Genesis 41:42–43 with Esther 6:11 and 8:2). So the Exodus reading is one layer in a book that is deliberately layered.
If the hypothesis is right, it makes the Quran’s choice look less like a mistake and more like a recognition. The book of Esther would already have shaped Haman as a Pharaoh-like persecutor, the same way a later retelling can carry the outline of an earlier story. Then the line of tradition would run:
Exodus (Pharaoh and his agents) → Esther’s Haman, built on the Pharaoh pattern → the Quran, placing Haman beside Pharaoh again.
That would be a more interesting story than “the Quran got confused.” It would mean the Quran restores the archetype to its original home. I would not claim this as established, but as a literary reading it is coherent, and it is consistent with everything above.
Names as Archetypes in Scripture
The argument depends on a premise that should not be controversial: scripture regularly uses a name to mean more than one person. The Bible does this constantly. A few examples:
Sodom. The prophet addresses Jerusalem’s leaders: “Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom!” (Isaiah 1:10, RSV). He is not speaking to people from the ancient city. He is calling the leaders of Jerusalem by the name of the city that stands for corruption. In the New Testament, Jerusalem is called, “allegorically, Sodom and Egypt” (Revelation 11:8, RSV).
Babylon. In Revelation, “Babylon the great” is a symbol for an oppressive empire in the author’s own day. The same use appears in 1 Peter 5:13, where “Babylon” is widely understood as a coded name for Rome.
Elijah. The prophet Malachi promises that God will send “Elijah the prophet” before the great day of the LORD (Malachi 4:5). In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that John the Baptist “is Elijah who is to come” (Matthew 11:14, RSV). In this telling, John is not the historical Elijah returned; he fulfills the role.
David. Ezekiel prophesies that God will set up over his people “one shepherd, my servant David” (Ezekiel 34:23, RSV). The historical David was long dead. The name stands for the ideal king to come.
Jezebel. In Revelation 2:20, a woman in the church at Thyatira is called “Jezebel.” Nobody supposes she is the Phoenician queen of the ninth century BCE. The name names a pattern.
Amalek. In Jewish tradition, “Amalek” itself became a type for the enemy who attacks the weak without cause, a role that individual enemies in later centuries were said to play, Haman among them.
The Talmud itself, as we saw, plays games with the names of Haman, Esther, and Mordecai. And the Quran’s naming practice is similar. In an earlier article on the Samarian, I looked at how the Quran names the calf’s instigator by the kingdom his act would later produce, rather than by a name tied to his own day. “Pharaoh” is a title that stands for a pattern of tyranny. “Qarun” stands for wealth gone proud. Names, in this mode of scripture, are verdicts as much as labels.
Seen in this light, “Haman” in the Quran is entirely in keeping with how the Bible itself uses names. It is the name that Jewish scripture had already made into a byword for the minister who serves a tyrant’s war on a people. Placing that name beside Pharaoh is a way of saying: this is the same kind of man, and this is the same kind of story.
The Name That Is Blotted Out
There is a last echo, and it is one that has lasted to this day.
Jewish law and custom around the reading of the Book of Esther build in a ritual of cursing Haman. The Shulchan Arukh, the standard code of Jewish law, says that when the Megillah (the scroll of Esther) is read, the reader must say:
One must say: “Cursed is Haman, blessed is Mordecai, cursed is Zeresh, blessed is Esther.” (Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayim 690)
צריך שיאמר ארור המן ברוך מרדכי ארורה זרש ברוכה אסתר
It also records the custom of children drawing Haman’s image or writing his name on wood or stone and striking it, so that his name will be wiped out, in fulfillment of the command about Amalek and the proverb that “the name of the wicked will rot” (Proverbs 10:7, RSV):
From this the custom developed of striking Haman when the Megillah is read in the synagogue. (Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayim 690)
ומזה נשתרבב המנהג שמכים המן כשקורים את המגילה בב”ה
This is the living form of the very command in Deuteronomy to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek.” Haman’s name is cursed aloud, year after year, in synagogues around the world. And that is the fate the Quran itself assigns to Pharaoh’s circle: those who “continued to commit tyranny on earth” and “could not evade” what was coming (29:39). The Quran’s sura on this story speaks of a curse that follows Pharaoh and his hosts in this life (28:42), and Haman stands inside those hosts, named with Pharaoh as a unit in 28:6 and 28:8. So when the Quran places Haman in the scene of Moses and Pharaoh, it is placing him among the very figures whom scripture condemns, and whose names the faithful, in Jewish practice, still curse.
It is entirely fitting, then, that Haman should appear in the story of Moses beside Pharaoh. The tradition that curses one name in the synagogue each spring is the same tradition that the Quran presumes when it sets the two men side by side in judgment.
Conclusion
Return to the two builders.
One is told to fire clay into brick and raise a tower, so a king can look at the God of Moses. The other builds a gallows for a man who would not bow, and finds himself hanged from it. In both stories, the minister is the instrument of a ruler’s pride, in both a people hangs in the balance, and in both the whole structure turns on the one who built it.
The objection says the Quran made an error by putting a Persian courtier in Egypt. But the evidence points the other way. The Haman of Esther is already a figure with no outside history, a man whose identity shifts from text to text, whose ancestry links him to the Exodus wilderness, whose name the rabbis treated as a riddle, and whom later tradition read as Pharaoh’s heir and improver. The Quran imports nothing of his Persian setting. It keeps only his role. And it is consistent about it, in six verses, in three different suras, always beside Pharaoh and always as the builder of the ruler’s will.
That is not what confusion looks like. It is what an archetype looks like: a name that means a kind of man, placed where that kind of man belongs.
The cursing of Haman in synagogues, and the curse on Pharaoh’s circle in the Quran, are two ends of the same thread. Wherever a proud ruler sets out to climb past his creator or to erase a people, scripture sends the same man to stand beside him. And wherever that happens, the story ends the same way: the tower falls, the gallows turns, and the name is blotted out.