Esther
An orphan becomes queen of Persia, a genocide is signed into law, and God is never named once. Esther, and ‘who knows if you're here for such a time as this’.
The story
The book opens with a party. King Ahasuerus of Persia, ruler of 127 provinces, throws a six-month display of wealth followed by a week-long drinking feast. On day seven, drunk, he orders Queen Vashti to come and be shown off. She refuses. His advisers panic that every wife in the empire will now defy her husband, and Vashti is banished by law. Then someone suggests a solution: round up the beautiful young virgins of the empire and let the king pick.
Esther is one of them. A Jewish orphan raised by her cousin Mordecai, taken into the palace harem, and told by Mordecai to hide her background. A year of beauty treatments, one night with the king, and he loves her more than the rest and crowns her. The text doesn't ask how she felt about any of it. Meanwhile Mordecai overhears a plot to assassinate the king, passes it to Esther, and the plotters are hanged. It goes in the official records and is forgotten.
Then Haman. Promoted to the top job, he expects everyone at the gate to bow, and Mordecai won't. Haman decides killing one Jew isn't enough and gets a decree signed to wipe out all of them, on a date chosen by casting lots, the pur. He offers to fund it himself. The king hands him his ring without asking a single question. The decree goes out. The king and Haman sit down for a drink, and the city of Susa is bewildered.
Mordecai tears his clothes and wails at the palace gate. Esther, inside, doesn't know why until she sends a messenger. Mordecai sends back the decree and an instruction: go to the king and beg. She replies with the problem. Anyone who approaches the king uninvited dies unless he holds out his sceptre, and she hasn't been called in thirty days. Mordecai's answer is the center of the book. Don't think you'll escape because you're in the palace. If you stay silent, help will come from somewhere else and you'll be lost. And who knows whether you haven't come to royal position for a time like this?
Esther's reply: gather the Jews in Susa and fast three days for me. I'll do the same. Then I'll go to the king, against the law, and if I die, I die. On the third day she stands in the inner court. He sees her and holds out the sceptre. What do you want, up to half the kingdom? She asks him to dinner, with Haman. At dinner he asks again. She invites them both back tomorrow.
That night the king can't sleep and has the records read to him, and hears how Mordecai saved his life and got nothing for it. Haman, meanwhile, has built a gallows over twenty metres high for Mordecai and comes in the morning to ask permission. Before he can, the king asks him what should be done for a man the king wants to honor. Haman, assuming it's him, describes a royal robe, the king's horse, a parade. Do all that for Mordecai, the king says. Haman leads the parade on foot, goes home humiliated, and is fetched to Esther's second dinner.
The king asks a third time. Esther answers: my life, and my people's. We've been sold to be destroyed. Who did this? he asks. This wicked Haman, she says. The king storms out; Haman throws himself on Esther's couch to beg; the king walks back in and reads it as an assault. A servant mentions the gallows at Haman's house. Hang him on it, the king says. They do. Mordecai gets the ring. But the decree can't be revoked, so a second one is issued letting the Jews arm and defend themselves on the day. They do, and thousands of their enemies die, and the text records the numbers. The book ends with a festival, Purim, still kept every year, and Mordecai as second in the empire.
The verse to keep
For if you remain silent now, then relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. Who knows if you haven’t come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
If you stay quiet now, rescue for the Jews will come from somewhere else, but you and your family will be lost. And who knows? Maybe you became queen for exactly this moment.
Mordecai doesn't say ‘God put you here’. He says ‘who knows?’. That uncertainty is the point: you act without the guarantee.
What it actually means
God's name isn't in the book. Not once. No prayer is recorded, no miracle happens, nobody hears a voice. What you get is a king who can't sleep on the one night that matters, a forgotten record that gets read at the right moment, and a queen who was in the right place for reasons that had nothing to do with her. The book lets you decide whether that's coincidence. Mordecai's ‘who knows?’ is as close as it gets to a theology, and it's a good one: you might be here for this. You can't be sure. Act anyway.
Esther isn't a fairy tale about a beautiful girl who wins a contest. She was taken. She hid who she was for years. When the moment came she didn't rush in; she fasted, planned two dinners, and waited for the right opening. Courage in this book is slow, strategic, and comes after three days of not eating. ‘If I perish, I perish’ is not a slogan. It's someone doing the math and going anyway.
The ending is violent, and it's honest to say so. The Jews' defense became a slaughter, and Esther asked for a second day of it. Some readers see justice against people who had signed up to kill them; others find it hard to cheer. You're allowed to hold both. What the book is sure about is that a people marked for death were still alive at the end, and that the threat was turned round by ordinary bravery in a world where God seemed absent. If that describes your world more than the burning bush does, this book was written for you.
Worth arguing about
- 1God isn't named once in Esther. Do you find him in it anyway? Where?
- 2‘Who knows if you're here for such a time as this.’ Is there a ‘this’ in front of you right now?
- 3Esther fasted three days and planned two dinners before she said a word. When is waiting wisdom, and when is it avoidance?
- 4How do you feel about the ending? Should you feel that way?
Read it yourself: Esther 4–7
World English Bible. 55 verses.
Whole book: Esther