Esther

Overview

Esther is the one book that never mentions God, and it is about nothing else. A Jewish orphan becomes queen of Persia; a court official plots to destroy every Jew in the empire; and a series of coincidences unravels him.

A sleepless night, an old record read aloud, a banquet, a misread gesture — each turn looks like chance and none of it is. The feast of Purim has been kept ever since in memory of the deliverance.

Background

Ahasuerus is Xerxes I, whose empire ran from India to Ethiopia. The feast that opens the book falls in the years he was gathering the armies that invaded Greece.

These were Jews who had not gone home when they could have. The book never comments on that, but it does show that God’s care did not stop at the border of the land.

Key themes

• God works unseen, through ordinary decisions and apparent coincidence.
• Courage at personal cost: if I perish, I perish.
• Pride builds its own gallows.
• Providence places people where they are needed, for such a time as this.
• God’s people are preserved, and their enemies’ schemes fall back on their own heads.

Outline

1. A queen deposed, a queen crownedChapters 1–2

   Vashti refuses, a search is made, and Esther is chosen — her people unknown.

2. Haman’s plotChapter 3

   Mordecai will not bow, and a decree goes out to destroy all the Jews.

3. For such a time as thisChapter 4

   Mourning in sackcloth, and Esther resolving to go in unbidden.

4. Two banquetsChapters 5–7

   The king’s sleepless night, Mordecai honored, and Haman hanged on his own gallows.

5. Deliverance and PurimChapters 8–10

   A second decree, the Jews defended, and a feast established.

Key passages

• Esther 2:17 Esther is made queen in the place of Vashti.
• Esther 3:8-9 Haman offers silver for the right to destroy a people.
• Esther 4:14 Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?
• Esther 4:16 If I perish, I perish.
• Esther 6:1 On that night could not the king sleep.
• Esther 7:10 They hanged Haman on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai.
• Esther 9:22 The month turned from sorrow to gladness.

Christ in Esther

Esther stands between her people and a death sentence, going to the throne at the risk of her life and asking for their lives as her petition. The pattern of a mediator who identifies with the condemned runs straight on to the one who did it without a possibility of being turned away.

Reading it

• Read it in one sitting; the reversals land harder that way.
• Mark every coincidence and ask who arranged it — that is the book’s argument.
• Note that Esther is never called a hero by the text; she is a young woman doing a frightening thing.