Esther
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome, and we are in the book of Esther today.
We have several different directions we want to go with our discussion of the book of Esther. The direction we do not want to go is simply telling the story, because you can read it. It’s very easy to understand in your Bible. Open your Bible and read it right now, pause the podcast…
Great, welcome back. You’ve finished reading it. Can we have the executive summary, perhaps?
Oh yeah. Well, it’s set in Persia. The time is the captivity. Actually, kind of after the captivity. Not everybody has gone back, but a lot of people have, so we’re somewhere in the middle of Ezra most likely, with Nehemiah’s story coming after this.
The king is called Ahasuerus here and I’m not going to defend this, I’m just going to say up front that, unlike most people, I think this is Darius, who was one of Cyrus’s generals and eventually took the throne. There was Cyrus, there was Cambyses, there was an imposter, and then Darius wiped out the imposter, took control, and settled things down.
If that’s the proper interpretation, here we are. He’s established himself on the throne and he throws a big party and he calls for his queen and she doesn’t want to show herself off and the advisors say “De-queen her.” She’s not divorced, but she is de-crowned.
Then the advisors, fearing that Ahasuerus may get back with this queen, Vashti, suggests – and yes, I have called it in the past a beauty contest. We’re going to take a look at that in a bit. His ministers order lots of pretty young girls from all over the place collected, and they come to him and he’s going to pick one of them to be his queen, and that’s how it opens.
We are now focused upon a young Jewish girl, actually a Benjamite, named Esther. That’s her Persian name. Her Hebrew name is Hadassah, which means myrtle or myrtle tree. If you read Zechariah, myrtle trees show up. There’s some significance there.
She’s an orphan and Mordecai, an older cousin or uncle, has taken care of her. Mordecai is an important figure. He’s mentioned in Ezra as coming back in the first return, but now he’s back here sitting in the king’s gates. He’s some kind of official probably representing Jerusalem or Judea, either politically or economically/financially.
When the soldiers come to collect girls, he knows he can’t really stop this, but he has a couple pieces of advice for her, mostly “Don’t tell anybody you’re a Jew.” He doesn’t explain why and we’re never told why exactly, but she is a very obedient young lady, as well as very beautiful, and she does what he says. So she’s swept into the palace intrigue of this choosing a new wife – actually a number of new wives for the harem – and that part of the story kind of stops there. So she’s in, she’s the new queen, and the emperor loves her, whatever that means at this point.
One last footnote that seems at the time not terribly important, but Mordecai learns of a plot to assassinate the emperor, tells Esther, Esther reports it in his name, it gets written in the chronicles, the would-be assassins are captured and hung, and that’s that.
Something interesting I just thought of is you can kind of consider Haman’s plot to exterminate the Jews more or less just collateral damage for getting rid of Mordecai. We’re having here the literary foreshadowing of his own fate, where people trying to unlawfully take life are hung. And spoiler alert – if you’ve just read Esther after pausing – is that Haman is ultimately hung for trying to, on a broader scale, assassinate Mordecai and all of his family and relatives.
I just caught that on my last read-through of Esther in the last week or so, the foreshadowing, the similarity there, so good job catching that. Hanging people on trees – we’ve seen it before in scripture and we’re going to see it again in scripture. Interestingly enough, most of the time it’s the bad guys who get hung.
It always gets me with Absalom. It’s like I’m seeing all this imagery, but he’s the bad guy.
I was teaching a bunch of high schoolers and we were going through Judges, where some of the kings of the Canaanites are trapped in a cave and then brought out and hung on trees, and I looked at that and said, “This seems so messianic, but they’re the bad guys.” I told my class, “There’s something here and I’m just missing it,” and one young lady raised her hand and said, “Yeah, but they were hung on trees and they were put back in the cave and stones were rolled in front of them and they never came out again.”
I don’t remember who to attribute it to, but somebody pointed out that these are failed types of Christ. Absalom is a failed messiah. He’s the son of the king. He is the heir to the throne of David.
Yes. He fits a lot of the little bullet points, if all you were concerned with were the bullet points and not decrepit morality. Even more so, all the failed types that show up are not just failed types and reverse types. They’re also in a sense real types, because Christ becomes sin on the cross.
That is a very clear connection of saying, “When you see Jesus go onto the cross, that is him very fully identifying with sinful humanity and with his people’s sins.”
So as you said, spoiler alert, we’re going to get to Haman and his execution. The King James says gallows. The Hebrew says it’s a tree. It’s not completely clear whether he was hung by a rope or simply impaled on the thing, and it doesn’t matter a whole lot. The type doesn’t have to be that exact.
Turning back to the story, you’ve already mentioned Haman so let’s bring him on stage. He is an Agagite, and the text doesn’t go further to explain that. Again, the Bible always assumes we’ve read everything to that point and taken notes. Agag is the name given the dynasty of kings of Amalek. In Amalek we go all the way back to the exodus.
When the children of Israel were leaving Egypt, the Amalekites, who were a sort of nomadic desert people, come up behind Israel and attack them from the rear, so they’re kind of sneaky and they’re kind of nasty and they’re very violent. They try to take out God’s people and take out the weak and the stragglers.
That’s where we first run into Joshua, too. Joshua leads the army into battle and Moses stands on the hill. As long as his hands are lifted to heaven Israel wins. If he drops his hands Israel loses. The point being that that begins the battle, and at the end of that when Amalek has been chased off God swears to have war with Amalek from generation to generation.
We run into Amalek in the book of Judges, mostly mercenaries. In the time of Saul, Saul is commissioned to destroy them once forever, and doesn’t. He instead leads a triumphal parade, including the king of the Amalekites. David has to deal with them some later.
Here we are at the end of Old Testament history and we still have one of these guys on stage. He’s worked his way up through the Persian administration. He’s just short of being prime minister to the emperor. In fact, he may actually hold that title after a while. He’s a big deal and he doesn’t seem to have any peculiar religious or ideological problem with the Jews as such. He just wants to be important and doesn’t like it when people don’t treat him that way.
We run into Mordecai now. Mordecai and everyone has been told to bow when Haman approaches, and Mordecai won’t. When people ask him his reason he says, “Because I’m a Jew,” and that’s something we can talk about. He doesn’t say, “Because the law of my God forbids it,” because the law of his God didn’t forbid it. There’s plenty of instances where godly people bow down to pagan rulers to show them respect, because men are in the image of God, made by God’s own hand, and there’s no sin there.
It seems to be the purely nationalistic idea that, “Our nations have hated each other forever, so I’m not showing you any kind of courtesy whatever.” Any thoughts about that or any other observations or possible interpretation?
I think it’s Peter Leithart who makes a big deal of Mordecai rejecting authority. This is in his book A House for My Name and it comes across very sort of finger-wagging like, “Don’t be like Mordecai. Don’t defy authority.”
I do struggle with that reading because there’s never any sense in the text that God disapproved. Granted, we’re not in a book where God is even called by name, so the book is clearly not literarily about to tell us, “Now God thought this was very bad. Don’t do that.” It’s also not the way of scripture that we always see the bad results of bad behavior, but still there’s no sense of disapproval. There’s no sense of it coming back to bite him later. You would just expect those things if Mordecai were in the wrong, literarily.
I have an answer and then a counter to my answer. The first answer would be that Haman sees this and decides to take out the entire Jewish people, which is kind of a bad thing.
The response to that is that when things have settled down, Mordecai still does not bow down to Haman, and again nothing bad seems to come of that. Mordecai says, “It’s because I’m a Jew.” In his mind that was a good reason. It was a reason he was willing really to die for, because when you disobey the emperor’s order that is a likely consequence, so he took it very seriously, whatever his reasons were.
I know that for me I sort of land on the side of probably Peter Leithart wagging my finger at Mordecai saying, “Really dude? You chose this battle?” but one way that I could see it being justifiable to an extent is the fact that he comes from the Amalekites, so in a sense you could almost make the argument that, “I’m just doing the same thing that God has declared against you.”
“I’m taking God’s side against you and your people because God…” and we could pull that in. God had said to Moses and Joshua, “I will have war with Amalek from generation to generation,” which kind of sounds like no reprieve, no repentance, no salvation, in which case Mordecai is saying, “I’m taking God’s side here.”
I’m also questioning what’s involved in the reverence that’s been commanded, because if it’s what’s supposed to be given to Caesar under Roman rule, that would be a problem. I mean the pinch of incense saying “Caesar is lord.”
I understand that, but since we have Nehemiah and Esther and Ezra all functioning in the king’s presence without any problem like that coming up, I think that’s unlikely.
I don’t think the emperor exalted Haman above himself. I think that’s unlikely.
What I was going to say is sometimes we aren’t given all the details, and trying to ferret them out – maybe we’ve said something here that someone will think about and they’ll write us and say, “You guys were on the right track on this one. You just should have followed it up,” so write us and let us know what we missed.
I was mentioning to you two before we started that there are conspiracies and there are conspiracies. This is a book about a conspiracy. It’s a really lame conspiracy from one point of view, because Haman begins it simply because his vanity is offended. Out of everyone else in the Persian court, there is one man who won’t bow down to him.
Apparently his reasoning is, “I’m a Jew. That means none of the Jews would bow to me.” Sometimes when somebody says, “Me and all my friends are here,” we need to go and ask the friends because they may not agree.
“This is what I believe, and my church agrees.” Maybe the church doesn’t. Maybe you need to go talk to some people and get a little more information. There’s a good deal in Proverbs about not saying what you think immediately, but searching things out before you commit yourself publicly.
On that hand, yes, it’s a very dangerous conspiracy. Yes, to some degree it changes redemptive history and alters the course of history. Human conspiracies often do. There’s two but-ifs. First, hell has a plan here. Hell is all about this. Hell has found a dupe who is so self-absorbed that he’s willing to exterminate an entire people simply because one member of it will not bow to him.
Yes. That’s what the book ultimately is about, we know. This is about the line of Christ. This is about the promise of Messiah. If Satan pulls this one off, then the gospel fails. God’s promises fail. The covenant fails. It’s all over. Satan is putting a lot on this one, and Haman does not have to understand this.
As you two know, I grew up in the midst of conspiracy theory and conspiracy thinking and all that, and the assumption always was that these people who are conspiring to do evil are very self-conscious, very intelligent, and they have a plan that includes all of these things, and all of these things were meant for evil, and they’re successfully one by one checking off the boxes, and it’s just all falling into their hands.
I’ve studied enough history since that even without my theology I think I would begin to question that. A lot of things that happened that were bad – yes, there was conspiracy behind it and the conspiracy failed miserably.
I’ll give you an example. You were both in my class at one time and you may remember me talking about Cecil Rhodes, who was the spokesman for British Imperialism in the late Victorian period, the guy behind the Rhodes scholarship, behind Rhodesia, behind an organization called the Roundtable, a conspiracy modeled after the Jesuits.
Its design was to promote British culture around the world and basically to impose it, because British culture was the best culture. It should be imposed in one way or another on everybody and should be the standard to which everyone is drawn. In the name of that, these people did some very horrible things, from promoting the Anglo-Boer wars to basically lighting the fuse for both World War 1 and World War 2.
The interesting thing is that by the time World War 2 is done there’s no British Empire anymore. Britain is sidetracked. It’s lost its command of the seas, and suddenly the Soviet Union has become a great power. This brilliant conspiracy got way out of their hands. They lost control. It did not do what they thought it would do, and their attempts to play God failed in the most miserable way. And yet I’ve seen books that trace the Illuminati, Roundtable, Bilderberg, whatever, as one unbroken sequence of successful conspiracies. Conspiracies do accomplish things, but they’re not always that successful.
You think of the Illuminati itself. It existed for, what, 15 years in the 19th century and dissolved horribly, and everyone is like, “Oh, it’s still continuing. It’s still running things to this day.” No, they’re all dead in Bavaria.
This is in part a book on conspiracy theory. Yes, here’s a conspiracy, begun for dumb reasons, supported by stupid wicked people for their own reasons, that immediately crashes and burns. Yes, it does do harm.
By the time we get to Nehemiah we see that part of the attack on the Jewish people included an attack on Jerusalem, and the walls had been broken down and the gates burned, and probably a few people died along the way. And yet by and large Esther looks at the consequences as largely positive. Lots of people became Jews, whatever that might mean, and the Jewish people had a prime minister in the Persian court who was looking after them and taking care of them, so that’s where these conspiracies go.
We as Christians really need to learn to stop being afraid of them, and to stop spending all our time trying to learn about them and expose them and educate people on them. As a matter of entertaining history it’s one thing, but as a matter of letting it set your religious assumptions or your eschatology, that’s something else and it can be a very dangerous sort of thing.
So Haman gets promoted and he finds out that Mordecai will not bow, and he decides he’s going to set his sights on the entire Jewish people, so he pulls up a calendar and starts casting lots – yes/no – across all the days of the calendar to find the lucky day, because like so many people the Persians were astrologers and the movement of the calendar was religiously or magically significant, so he starts doing this: Day 1 – no. Day 2 – no. Day 3 – no. Day 4 – no. Day 20 – no. Day 30 – no. Day 300 – no. On any given roll of the die, or flip of the coin in this case, black/white stone, it is 50/50.
I’m not sure how you calculate the average over 340-so days. I think at that point probably the odds shift somehow. We should ask Tim French or one of the men who are better with statistics than I am how you calculate things when it’s that long and over that much time. But surely in our experience if you get 340 no’s and suddenly you get a yes, that’s when you say, “I should be afraid. I should be very afraid.”
Yeah, something just changed. But Haman jumps up and says, “Oh, that’s the perfect day.” So when the day comes he sends out letters by post to tell all the empire, “Hey, you got Jewish neighbors you hate and you want their stuff? On that day you can go for it. You’ve got the full support of the emperor and the empire and the armies and the bureaucracy.”
The Jews are perplexed and worried. The whole palace at Shushan is perplexed and worried, which is interesting because it’s largely not made up of Jewish people, but apparently the Jewish people were not hated and despised in the capital, because the whole city is like, “Hmm, what’s this all about?”
Now we’re in trouble and Mordecai appeals to Esther. “You’re the queen. Go talk to your husband,” and she says, “That’s not quite how things work. You have to be summoned into his presence. If you go presumptuously you die, unless he extends mercy in the form of a golden scepter, and I have not been to see my husband in a month.” So Esther does not know. Yes, she was the favorite. She’s the queen.
With these emperors we really need to reckon with a different kind of psychology. The Persian kings didn’t think they were gods, but they thought they were awfully close. We look at some of our leaders in Washington in the White House and the courts and we think they’re pretty full of themselves, but these men seriously not only thought they were the right hand of God, but so did everyone around them.
When they say, “You can’t come here unless I ask you,” they actually do mean it. It’s not a joke. It’s not a bluff. They were used to executing people who presumed to come in. We know in Nehemiah, he knew he shouldn’t even be sad in the emperor’s presence, because to be in the emperor’s presence, even when invited, was such a joy and a privilege that you better be happy.
So Esther is looking at this and saying, “Umm, my husband hasn’t really talked to me for a month. That doesn’t really sound favorable, and I could get myself killed,” and Mordecai replies, “Get over yourself. Tough. It may be that God has put you here for such a time as this. God is going to save his people.”
He doesn’t say God. Remember, the word God never appears in the text. His sentence is very passive. “Deliverance will arise to the Jews from someplace else, but you and your father’s house will perish,” and she says, “Alright. Go fast for me.” The one religious practice that’s mentioned is fasting, without reference to prayer, although presumably they would have prayed.
It’s an interesting contrast to feasting, which sort of organizes the rest of the book.
Good point. I hadn’t even thought about that. Yes, the whole book is wrapped up in feasts, from the first feast where Vashti says no to her husband, to Esther’s feast when she’s queen. There are a number of other feasts along the way, and it culminates in two feasts that Esther throws.
This is the one fast, the one time in the middle where we’re not celebrating and where things are kind of scary. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what intervention will come, because again we’re not even using the name of God here. God is not using his own name. That’s something we can talk about later.
So Esther says, “Fast, and I’ll go into the king. If I perish, I perish,” and she goes in.
Now, we all know how that goes, but the first audience may not have known exactly, and it’s supposed to be sort of a cliffhanger. “What will happen? What will happen?” But he raises the golden scepter, invites her in, and knows that this has got to be something terribly serious, and offers formally “…to half my kingdom, whatever you want.”
She kind of beats about the bush and says, “I want you to come to a banquet I’m going to prepare, and bring Haman, and then I’ll tell you what this is about.” So the emperor comes and so does Haman. Haman is stoked. He’s got a private invitation with the emperor and the queen? Wow!
The king realizes, “This is not what you want. What is this really about?” He’s not completely stupid – a little naïve in picking Haman as his prime minister, but he realizes something is going on here. She says, “If I’ve found favor in your sight, if this and that, come to another banquet I’ll prepare tomorrow and then I’ll tell you.” Haman goes away rejoicing, and as he goes away he runs into Mordecai, who still will not bow.
He goes home and tells his wife and his friends how great he is, how everything is so wonderful and everything is going so well, “But it avails me nothing as long as I see Mordecai there not bowing.” His wife says, “Well, you know what? Why don’t you build a gallows for him and then ask the emperor for permission to hang him?”
“That’s it! That’s great. That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” so they start building this gallows, which is quite high.
I feel like this wife is one of those examples where the husband has this problem and he’s so absorbed in it, and then the wife comes along very problem-solvey, also very callous, which is how women tend to be with these things. “We’ll have him executed, obviously.”
That’s the comparison I was going to draw next. It’s like, wow, husbands have got to choose better wives – these guys, anyway.
They’re go-getters. Say what you will about them, but they are girl bosses.
The text then shifts and tells us that night the king couldn’t sleep. We’re not told why, but insomnia of some sort. He calls for the royal chronicles, probably thinking if anything can put me to sleep it will be that, and they’re read aloud before him and it comes to the part where Mordecai’s testimony had saved the king’s life.
“Huh,” so the king thinks about that. We’re not told if he ever gets to sleep or not, because early in the morning Haman is there all ready to ask for Mordecai’s execution. The king notices there’s someone out in the court waiting and says, “Who is that?”
“Oh, bring him in, just the guy. Haman, what should be done for the man the king delights to honor?” and Haman thinks, “Who would the king delight in more than me?” and he lists a whole bunch of things – a public parade adorned in the king’s crown and attire and such. The king says, “That’s great! Take all that stuff and do this to Mordecai the Jew.” And Haman, without a word, does it all because you don’t defy the king.
We’re not told how Mordecai took all this, probably a little bit amused and bemused at the whole thing because he doesn’t care about such things. When it’s all done, Haman comes back and tells his wife, “This is what just happened,” and she says basically, “Oh, that was Mordecai the Jew, the guy you’re trying to kill? Oh honey, you’re so dead.”
And while that conversation is going on, the guards come to take him to the banquet he’s almost forgotten. So again the banquet takes place, and again the king says, “What do you really want? What’s going on here? To half my kingdom,” and finally Esther tells the truth. “I want my life. I want the life of my people. If we’d been sold as slaves I wouldn’t even be here, but he’s trying to kill us all.”
Presumably Haman is hearing this, and little by little the pieces are clicking together. “Huh, death on a genocidal level, that sounds like something I’d do. That’s brilliant….uh-oh…”
I can see this as Esther playing a little dumb. “I think his name is Ha-ha-man, Haman, that’s right. Oh my goodness, Haman!”
Well, Haman is terrified. The king has a temper and people have pointed this out, but each time we see the temper about to go off he always removes himself from the situation, lets himself cool down, and then generally gets advice. That’s what had happened with Vashti. He didn’t just fly off the hammer and order something horrible. He calmed down and asked his councilors.
So here again, for fear of doing the wrong thing – because Haman’s an important person right here, but of course his wife is here too – and we’re talking about an entire population group that he as emperor is theoretically responsible for, he probably should take that into mind. He still doesn’t quite probably understand who this people is, because he’s had reports from Jerusalem and has seemed to favor the Jews. This would be in the book of Ezra. But he hasn’t put two and two together yet.
So he storms out into the garden trying to calm down and get his mind around what he knows. Haman realizes he’s dead. The only one here who could possibly save him would be Esther, because you know, the girl. “I’ll appeal to the girl. Women have soft hearts and soft heads” he’s thinking. “I can just win her if I just show enough sorrow and repentance here.”
In those days they didn’t sit at tables. They reclined around them, so she’s on a couch with her feet stretched out away from the table, and he falls on top of her to plead for his life. We’re not told what she does – probably looks askance and says, “What is going on here?’ At this point the king walks back in and sees Haman laying on top of the queen.
My wife just taught this to her elementary class and she said their response was, “Awkward!” Again it’s one of those things that in teaching Esther some teachers either don’t get or don’t really explain.
The king says, “What, is he going to force the queen in front of me?” The word ‘force’ means rape. “Is he going to rape the queen while I’m standing here? Because right now mass genocide – what’s a rape compared to that?”
Before he can even say anything, we’re in Esther’s little house, her own little domain, her servants, and they all love her, so as soon as the king has given any kind of indication that he’s done with Haman, they grab a bag or something and put it over Haman’s head and mouth so he can’t talk and defend himself and say something like, “I was just asking for mercy. I didn’t mean it to look like that.”
They don’t let him get a word out. He stepped on a lot of people on the way up, and they’re all remembering him as he comes down.
So they look at the king and say, “Your Majesty, there’s this gallows that he built for Mordecai, who saved her life,” and the king says, “Hang him on it,” and they do. So there’s the gallows, the anti-Christ hung on a tree, and it begins the process of salvation for the Jewish people.
But we’ve still got a couple problems. There’s this thing that we found out way back in Daniel. The law of the Medes and Persians cannot be altered. So Ahasuerus says, “I’m on your side, babe, but I can’t undo this.”
“It’s already on the calendar, set in stone. The Google invites have been sent.”
In a little more religious and magical sense, “I speak for the gods, and the gods have to remain consistent,” which is why on other occasions the emperors will learn to say, “…until I change my mind.”
“Yes, because I’m leaving myself a loophole here.” He had not done this this time, but he does say, “Oh, this is Mordecai? He’s your cousin, like an uncle to you? He’s the one who saved my life, and Haman who just tried to rape you is his enemy? Ok, I’ve got this. Here, I’ll take this ring off Haman and give it to you. It’s my signet. You’re now my prime minister, and you two – Mordecai and Esther – you can write letters to whoever you want, however you want, invoking whatever royal authority. You can’t undo what I’ve said, but you can add to it. And if you can think of anything that will help, go for it. You’ve got my complete backing.”
And with a little thought they simply write to the Jews everywhere and make it very public and say, “The emperor is now on your side. He gives you permission to defend yourselves,” which is a big deal. In our world in the west and America particularly, we don’t think that we have to appeal to our governor to get permission to do self-defense.
Well, after the last thing in the pandemic maybe we are beginning to think that, but originally nobody in America would think such a stupid thing, but in that world you did. You had to have permission to draw weapons, use weapons, all that, and the emperor grants it.
“Furthermore, the entire empirical bureaucracy and military will be on your side.” Now, that didn’t end the threat because there were still some people who didn’t care. They figured they could still take out some of God’s people and come away with some loot. Between their anger and bitterness on the one hand and their greed on the other, it was worth a shot.
Others pulled back and said, “Ummm, when this is over, Mordecai, this Jewish guy, is going to be prime minister, and the queen is now a self-confessed Jew. I think I’m going to be on their side now because it’s going to be more profitable on every level.”
Furthermore, we’re told that a lot of people were just flat-out afraid of Mordecai and began to take this whole God of Israel thing seriously, and many people became Jews for fear of what was going on here. So this did launch a revival of some sort. How deep? God knows, but there were prophecies that God would set up his throne in Elam, which is Persia, so this is something. Although it’s barely mentioned, it is important to the story.
So the day comes. The enemies come. The Jews fight and they win. They don’t take the spoil for themselves. What they do with it is unclear. They may have turned it over to the king or just let it sit there and rot, or they may have sent it to Jerusalem to be used in the temple.
One of our teachers at school just pointed out to me this week as we were going through Esther that this sounds a lot like what happened with Saul when he took Agag and the Amalekites. He was not supposed to take the spoil, but he did and it got him in all sorts of trouble. So if the Jews are taking this as an extension of that original conflict, then perhaps they realize that at least the spoil is not for them. Whether or not they too will give it to the Lord their God, which is what Saul said he was going to do, is not completely clear and apparently is not that big a deal at this point for us.
The last thing that happens is that Mordecai and Esther declare a feast. With royal authority they say, “This is going to be a day the Jews are going to celebrate, and in fact we’re going to celebrate it in perpetuity till the end of time. Haman tried to find a day to kill us by throwing lots (lot is pur) so we’re going to call this feast Purim (lots),” and it continued to be celebrated among God’s people till the time of Christ, and the Jewish people ever since. There would be nothing wrong with Christians celebrating it after a fashion and recognizing again God’s great acts in history.
And that’s kind of how it’s described. They had joy and light and a good time and sent portions to one another. It sounds a little bit like our Christmas, without some of the materialism.
One thing that we could consider as we now go back and pick up some pieces here and there, they weren’t prophets. They weren’t priests. There was no divine voice from Sinai, and yet they established a feast that God’s people celebrated throughout the rest of old covenant life, and God at no point seems to have objected.
They understood that it is good and right to celebrate from generation to generation the great acts of God in history, and this was a pretty great act. This was the salvation of the Jewish people and the messianic line, so they did not hesitate to add a feast to the calendar.
We can consider this in terms of what we sometimes call the regular principle of worship. It conforms. God’s people and God himself had set up feasts to honor his great acts, and they extended that. “Here’s another great act.”
God’s people are coming of age to such a point that, just as Zerubbabel and Joshua and shortly Nehemiah will reinstitute a new covenant, a restoration covenant, without explicit divine authority, although there are lots of hints and suggestions and encouragements, Esther and Mordecai also say, “Look, we can add a feast and we ought to, to the glory of God.” Again, the text does not say glory of God.
Here are some things we can talk about now. I want to go back and talk about the beauty contest, because we kind of skimmed over that, and I want to talk about this idea of God’s people growing up, and I want to talk about the whole lack of God’s name, his worship, the prophets. What’s God doing there? What’s that all about? So who would like to take what here?
With the so-called beauty contest, I think it’s as important as ever, as we’ve said several times, not to turn the Bible into a cast of heroes who were morally impeccable. We talked about this with Mordecai, that we’re not quite agreed or sure of how to read him or how God viewed the stance that he took, but neither do we really know about Esther. As my pastor in college used to say, “Oh, it was a beauty contest,” or “Oh, it was a talent show, and she won.” So we don’t know what to make of her, and it's okay because that’s not the point.
For those of you who may not understand this, and this is something I was confessing to Emily earlier that I missed for a very long time, all of those women who came before the king he took to bed and they became his wives. They departed from his bed to his harem. They became concubines. That is unendowered wives who were true wives, but they would almost certainly never see him and never see his bed again. They effectively, by spending a night with him, became nuns for the rest of their life – pampered, provided for, best food, best clothes, but completely shut off from any male contact, wives in name only, as it were, used women.
We need to look at that and say, “That’s bad.” There’s a lot of good you can say about Ahasuerus by the end of the book, but at this point the way he treats women is not acceptable, and Esther had to go through that. She did not have much of a choice. She could have screamed and made a scene. Whether or not that would have helped is another question. She could have killed herself. Some people, even Bible teachers, would probably suggest that rather than submit to such a thing. Suicide is an option.
Nor do I. You’re not the guilty party and we need to place values in the right place. But this is a pagan empire. Despite the fact it’s going to get a Jewish prime minister and it’s going to have a Jewish queen, and despite the fact that this king does great things for God’s kingdom, and may in the end actually be saved, we may see him in heaven, right now with this thing we run into it’s not a godly society. It’s not safe and it has a very low attitude toward women.
Yeah, but the interesting thing is that for the last 100 years or so Christians have been blamed for lowering the status of women, for treating women so poorly.
It is historically laughable, but most people don’t read history anymore. They just assume when they hear things like Paul talking about submission and obedience that he’s just a woman-hater and surely pagan societies were better than that. No.
Let’s say any serious historian. Anybody who’s actually read the primary sources.
As an example, the rights of life and death that a paterfamilias had. They could just decide they didn’t like you that day and legally be okay with killing you or having you executed or something like that.
So we’re looking at a pagan society that treats women very poorly – horribly in fact – and it’s into this that Esther came, and through this she navigated and God blessed her. As you say, we don’t know her heart. We know that she tried to submit to her parent-figure through all of this.
Or maybe she thought it was practically useful to conceal her identity if everybody hated Jews.
How about there’s no mention of God here or his word or the prophets or Jerusalem or worship. There’s only mention of Jews and fasting. Maybe this will help you understand my question. As I said, I grew up in a home where conspiracy theory was huge. On one of the shelves in our house there was a kind of paperback thrown-together book, mimeographed maybe, and I just looked at it once or twice to see, “What in the world is this thing?” and then had nothing more to do with it.
Basically it argued that Esther is not a part of scripture, that it’s a Zionist propaganda document, that it shows the way Jews really think and they’re all about their gleeful attempt to destroy people who see them for what they are, and it went on and on like that. This was never a part of scripture, not a part of the Bible when Jesus came to earth and so on and so on. What allowed this author to make some distance with this I think was the fact that there’s no explicit mention of God or his promise.
We could look at it and say this is a secular book. There’s nothing religious about it, so what do you think God’s up to here and what can we learn from it?
Most of life is that way, not that most of our Christian life doesn’t make mention of Jesus or God or miracles or promises, but in day-to-day life – a) we don’t have miracles every day or they wouldn’t be called miracles; b) God does not write his name in the sky for us to read every day. He did put it in a book, but that’s different. We don’t live our life waiting for a miracle. We live our life taking the actions that are appropriate and wise for us to take, if we can.
If we want to know how God works, this is a great book to read because he’s worked through sinful people’s choices.
My cheater’s answer is of course it’s still a religious book because it’s a book talking about history, and history takes place in God’s world. The poem that I just keep seeing referenced by various people is – I can’t remember the title but I know it’s Gerard Manley Hopkins – “The earth is charged with the grandeur of God” and no less the things that happen on the earth.
So we don’t have to make a book religious. We just have to make sure, if it’s one we’re writing, that it’s the right religion. God is showing us in part that that doesn’t necessarily require us to have his name all over it, or conversion seen by chapter 3.
Relatedly, I don’t remember if you said it before we started the episode or if you said it in the beginning, but there is sort of an indication here about telling stories that are fictional as well, and I don’t want to say it’s an arch-example because it is late in history, but take Lord of the Rings. It takes place in a world that is suffused with theological meaning and importance, and if you read The Silmarillion it’s a bit more blatant about it, with the Numenoreans particularly worshiping Eru Iluvatar, which is God.
If you read Lord of the Rings you get a couple of scant references to Eru, and maybe a dozen references to the Valar, but for the most part the most you get is there’s a big bad guy who’s a spirit and he’s trying to kill us. We should kill him back.
Exactly. There’s something there in Esther that points to this as a legitimate story to tell. It’s not immoral to tell a story that does not explicitly say, “By the way, Jesus died for your sins. Have you considered becoming a Christian and joining His church?”
A lot of people did at that time, based on what they saw happening it seems.
I’m glad you brought in Lord of the Rings. There is one of the almost but not quite explicit references to God. Gandalf is talking to Frodo and says, “I can make it no more clear than to say that Bilbo was meant to find the ring, not by its owner, and therefore you were meant to have it.”
Now, Eru Iluvatar is not mentioned there. This is a passive sentence, kind of like, “Deliverance will arise to the Jews from someplace else,” not God will do it. And Gandalf is saying, “I can’t make it any clearer.” Yes, Gandalf, you really could have. “Iluvatar has ordained you from the foundation of the world. I am full of his Holy Spirit, the secret fire, and I tell you this because I’m an angel.”
No, he’s not as clear as he could be, and it would change the entire tenor of the book had he been that clear, and it would scare a lot of people off, honestly.
Of course, did any of the angels that you encountered in Europe walk up to you and say, “Hey, I’m an angel. Let me help you”?
There was a time when my friend David Farschman and I were both much younger and went to Europe. He had just graduated and there were a couple incidences where we were in situations that humanly speaking were hopeless. We were going to get lost in Germany and no way out, and people just showed up, two people in particular, and supplied what we needed.
In retrospect as we look back on what they did for us, it was absolutely necessary because we couldn’t figure out what to do, but each of them in some way didn’t live up to his billing. One guy said, “I’m bicycling across Europe” but had no bicycle. He wanted to get to a train, and yet as soon as he found the way to get there he went and had coffee and left us to go to the train. The other was a woman military officer for NATO who got off the bus but had never gotten on it, and walked up and said, “Hi guys, how can I help you?”
The real fast version. Were they angels? Certainly they were angels in the sense that God sent them to us to help. Were they spirits? We’ll ask God someday, but there are a lot of really unexplained questions, although it’s left me with this legacy. Anytime I’m someplace, particularly Europe, I look for a chance to be that angel, to walk in on somebody and just supply them with help, and then leave without a word, just to play mind games with them.
What you have said already has sort of brought us there, and I mentioned it earlier. We’re coming to the end of old covenant history and God is making his people grow up. He’s not providing prophets. He’s not providing miracles. The sun does not move in the sky. The rivers don’t turn to blood. Frogs don’t multiply out of the river. No lightning from heaven.
The king has a feud with his wife and gets a new wife. He can’t sleep and needs some chronicles read to him. A queen has enough courage to go risk her life to save her people. You can look at that and say, “Well, this didn’t require God. There was no miracle here.” Oh, this absolutely required God. As you say, every bit of it is charged with divinity. This is God’s history and hell is screaming, “No, not there!”
I want to touch on something just in the phrasing. You said he’s helping his people grow up, and what immediately sprang to mind was Jeremiah when he says, “I will make a covenant with you that is not like the covenant that I made with your fathers when I led them by the hand out of Egypt.”
It’s that childlike imagery. It’s like they were very much childish as well, but he’s helping them to not in the ultimate sense make do without him…
Yeah. By the time we’re done with this we’re going to have God’s people scattered throughout a pagan world, living among pagan neighbors in pagan neighborhoods, going to assembly on the Sabbath day and reading the word of God and singing praises to him, and then going out witnessing to their Gentile neighbors about Messiah. Does this sound like anything that’s about to happen in the world?
When the apostles go out, the synagogues are there and a lot of them just became churches, because all the practical everyday stuff was in place. God was getting them ready not to have priests, but to have lay leaders, not to have new scripture but to read the scriptures and study the scriptures they had, and not to be a people turning inward because “we’re the people of the promise,” but turn outward to win God-fearers and even converts to Judaism. When Paul and the others go out, this is what they find and it’s their launching pad for the gospel into the Roman empire, so God is getting his people ready.
This is one evidence, one step where we see, “This is how Christians live.” Sometimes someone just can’t sleep and something happens because of it. Sometimes someone does a good deed and good comes back from it. Sometimes you go ask the authorities to do something really cool, and surprise surprise, they actually do it.
I just got my jury duty shifted because I actually asked. “My wife has scheduled an anniversary thing for us over on the coast and it’s right there and we’d miss it. Can you move – I know you can’t, but if there’s anything you can do…”
It’s a little little thing, but for us right now it’s kind of a big thing. Sometimes we don’t ask people in power. We just assume they’re opposed to the gospel and it’s useless, and sometimes they’re just ordinary people doing their job, and sometimes they’re even nice, and sometimes they may actually have some Christian influence. They may even be Christians quietly, like Obadiah who was Ahab’s steward.
So we are not to be ashamed or afraid of our Christianity. We’re not to be ashamed to witness. We’re not to be quiet about who we are as Christians. We don’t need to be obnoxious, but we need to tell the truth and, as you say, we need to walk by faith and not by sight.
One of the problems with the Pentecostal/Charismatic movements is this tendency to want to live by miracle, by new revelation, by new input from God, rather than saying, “You know, we have the Bible. It’s sufficient. Let’s learn it really, really, really well, and then try to apply it by faith in the power of the Holy Spirit.”
I guess those are our lessons, and thank you. I was really concerned this would fall down into just telling the story. It’s a wonderful story, but as you say people can read it for themselves, and presumably did when we had them pause.
Let’s make some recommendations before we sign off. I think Bryan had his recommendation thrust upon him and he seemed ready to give it.
Some choose a recommendation, others have a recommendation thrust upon them.
Mine is the subject of the past several weeks of labor on my part. I built from scratch three raised garden beds, in which we layered in logs and some mulch from our ducks over the winter, and compost and topsoil and finally peat moss, so that we can have a garden again.
Last year we did not have raised garden beds. We just kind of used the real estate on the periphery of our lawn, and we got some stuff that grew and we were able to eat. I think we actually still have one of the butternut squashes still in our freezer. But we basically said we want to do more, so I started building these raised garden beds.
Basically, the recommendation is to get outside and build something, if you feel so inclined, if that’s something that you want to put on your personal resume, and then also gardening. Gardening is a wonderful way to enjoy God’s creation and have something to show for it that is practical. If for some reason you need a practical outcome at the end of your efforts to justify it to yourself, gardening is a great way to do that.
Recommendation: Get outside and build somethingOur God planted a garden at the beginning of history and he said it was very good, so you can take part in that image-wise. You can image that. One of the women who came to the tomb mistook Jesus for the gardener. It’s also just fun. Maybe that makes me boring, but I don’t care. It’s fun.
Exactly. Build a thing and spend time with your loved ones in dressing and keeping a garden.
I’m coming up short because my life has also been taken up with things that might sound boring.
Today I made a salad for dinner that we have not yet eaten, but we used a bunch of stuff that we haven’t used before. We had some radishes and turnips. We’ve been eating chard this week, which is really good in scrambled eggs. Take some ham or bacon and then saute the chard and then scramble your eggs. It’s real nice.
I really liked the turnips. Radishes are the super strong peppery ones, but turnips are just so chill and they’re refreshing. I think turnips are under-rated, and that is my recommendation for the day.
Did you cook the turnips at all or just eat them raw? This was in your salad, not the eggs?
I’m going to be even less impressive than either of you, but kind of build on both of you, and that is you should all grow green onions. This is a very easy thing to do. When you buy some green onions from the store, you save the heads with the little roots attached. You can stick them in a little cup of water.
Just let them grow, and then in time you take them out and plant them. I’m just looking out the window at ours. They get super huge if you forget to use them or don’t have occasion to use them, and in the end they puff at the end and have these little blossoms and spread more seeds.
Once they’re settled you can go out every other day or so and just chop a few off. If you plant enough, you’ll have green onions for the year and beyond. They just keep coming back. Eventually they get kind of big and you’ll probably want to replace them. But you want to do a salad? You want to do scrambled eggs?
All kinds of things, and the thing is you can plant them in anything. We have some in our planters. We have an orange rose tree that’s kind of falling over, but I just put some in there because it’s dirt and handy, and they grow just fine. They’re not dainty. They don’t require a lot. And then you don’t have to buy things at the store, but if you want to make something a little nicer, there it is. It’s fresh. You grew it, so there you go, my recommendation.
Solid. Thank you, guys, so much. This has been a super fun episode to record. Listeners, I hope you enjoyed listening to it as well.
If you’d like to get in touch with us, let us know what you think about Mordecai and Esther and anything else you want to tell us about by emailing us at [email protected].
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