“Therefore they called these days Purim, after the term Pur. Therefore, because of all that was written in this letter… the Jews firmly obligated themselves and their offspring and all who joined them, that without fail they would keep these two days.” — Esther 9:26-27 (ESV)
They named the festival after the thing that was supposed to kill them.
Purim comes from the word Pur, the lot that Haman cast to choose the most auspicious date for the destruction of the Jewish people. The lot that, in his mind, was the divination tool that secured his timing. The lot that God used to give His people eleven months of runway for rescue. The Jewish people could have named the festival after Esther. They could have named it after Mordecai. They could have named it after the month of their victory.
They named it after Haman’s weapon.
This is remarkable because every time the festival of Purim is celebrated, it is a reminder that the instrument of the enemy’s plan became the name of the victory celebration. They did not erase the lot from the story. They memorialised it. They refused to let the community forget that the very mechanism Haman used to engineer their destruction was the mechanism that God used to set the stage for their salvation.
We are often tempted to clean up the memory of our hardest seasons, to present the testimony without the detail of what we came through, to speak only of the victory and not the lot that was cast, the decrees that went out, the months of dread that preceded the reversal. But the name Purim suggests that there is value in keeping the instrument of the enemy in the story, not to glorify the enemy but to demonstrate that God’s sovereignty extends even to the tools that were pointed against us.
Today, think about the thing in your testimony that you have been tempted to leave out. The specific trial. The particular season of dread. Consider whether it belongs in the name of your celebration, because it reveals most clearly what God actually did.
Father, help me hold my testimony with honesty. The weapon that was meant to destroy me, the specific instrument that I have been tempted to leave out of the story, let it be part of the name of what you did. In Jesus’ name, amen.
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