Hadassah, Queen of Persia

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 Rachel Voytek, and we are talking today about the restoration – Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, all that good stuff.

I can’t remember quite where we left off last time so we’ll do a quick recap of Zerubbabel and Joshua, who were the first to lead the return, the mass exodus, second exodus, Zerubbabel being the political leader, a descendant of Judah, and Joshua being the high priest.

Now if you’re paying attention, Listener, you will note that there is a problem with Joshua being the high priest, having never served in the temple or been cleansed or ordained to his office in the ways prescribed in the Old Testament, which is where Zechariah comes in handy. I’m just going to toss this to you, Greg, at this point, because it’s a minor prophet and I’m scared.

A lot of people are scared of the minor prophets. They come to you in your dreams with sharp teeth and flaming red eyes and we never know where to find them. They’re somewhere toward the back of the Old Testament we think, but we’re not sure, unless you’ve memorized the song.

Zechariah is one of the last prophets to write in the old covenant era. He and Haggai are serving at the same time and they’re encouraging Joshua and Zerubbabel to rebuild the temple. The only prophet who comes after them who writes as what we think of as a writing prophet is Malachi. He writes about the same time that Nehemiah is doing his stuff.

So here we are and yes, this is a real problem because the original tabernacle system was initiated from Mount Sinai, God telling Moses, “Do this stuff to Aaron and he’ll be high priest. And build the tabernacle and get it going this way, and I’ll come and bless it.” We don’t have any of that. We have a political decree from a God-fearer, Emperor Cyrus saying, “Go back and rebuild this temple thing and get it going,” so here they are.

Some have called this a Catch-22. For Joshua to begin his work he must be set aside, anointed, dedicated according to the law and temple rites, and to do that you would need a temple. You don’t have a temple because you don’t have a priest to initiate the rites, so as soon as you get a priest to initiate the rites you can ordain a priest…it goes in a circle here.

By the way, can I just throw in some interesting Mormon history. This is a real problem for the Mormon church, given that the first two people of the Mormon church had to baptize each other, which is unlawful in the Mormon church because then one of them was baptizing as an unbaptized person.

Yes, some of our Baptist friends might consider their own heritage along the same lines.

“That sprinkling stuff isn’t real baptism.”

“Okay, well you baptize me and then…hmm.”

In the midst of this Zechariah has a vision. This is Zechariah 3.

And he shewed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him.

So there’s Joshua getting ready to do his high priestly stuff, except Satan is there hurling accusations at him.

And the LORD said unto Satan, The LORD rebuke thee, O Satan; even the LORD that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee. Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?

We’re not seeing what Zechariah is seeing, so now he tells us.

Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments and stood before the angel.

The angel of the Lord, thus Jesus. So here’s the problem. The garments are defiled and that’s a problem, because the garments here represent the moral and spiritual character of the man. How does a sinner just jump right into representing God to man and man to God? This is what Satan is pointing out. Satan is not in a sense lying. He is simply pointing out what seems to be obvious: This man is a filthy polluted sinner. How in the world can you permit him to act as a mediator between God and men?

But the angel of the Lord says – he does not say shut up. I almost said that. He says, “The Lord rebuke thee,” because he does not say shut up to Satan. He just turns it over to his Father and lets his Father deal with it.

And he answered and spake unto those that stood before him, saying, Take away the filthy garments from him.

So there are others there, perhaps other priests or angels, and they come and take away the filthy garments.

And unto him he said, Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment.

So the angel of the Lord takes it all upon himself, and being God he can do that and he can do it on the basis of what he will one day do, but it’s all on him. It’s not on anything in Joshua. So the clothes are changed and Zechariah gets into this. He says –

And I said, Let them set a fair mitre upon his head.

That’s the priestly turban that bears the plate “Holiness to the Lord.”

So they set a fair mitre upon his head, and clothed him with garments. And the angel of the LORD stood by.

Then there are promises that follow. He points to Joshua as a type, an image, the branch of Messiah who is to come. So now Joshua is restored by the angel of the Lord directly, even better than Moses, and he can go about and do the sacrificing and get the rituals going to restore the temple, so it was a critical moment.

The world will look at this and say, “You’ve got people, you’ve got money, you’ve got stuff, just get going with your religious stuff.” No, it’s not that easy. This is actually a very critical moment in redemptive history. How do you get around this? God intervenes personally. There’s no Mount Sinai. There’s no thundering and fire and Shekinah glory. There’s a vision, a dream, and it is enough. God speaks directly through his prophet and pushes the button and things start going, and yet restoration worship will never be what it had been under Solomon. It’s a smaller temple. The Shekinah glory is absent as far as appearance is concerned. The ark of the covenant is gone. There’s no divine fire on the altar. But it is worship acceptable to God because God has declared it so.

So now the countdown begins. We’re waiting for Messiah. Daniel has said 490 years till the coming of Messiah. We have Daniel’s chart of the empires to come – golden Babylon, silver Medo-Persia, brazen Greece, and then iron Rome, and then the coming of the kingdom of the God of heaven. So after 4,000 years we’re down to under 400 years. We’re getting close and yet we’re not there yet. Meanwhile, the Persian empire rules the world.

The situation is not so removed from our own, where we expect greater and greater things for the kingdom of God, and yet we look around and the Persian kings were in many ways better than a lot of our presidents and parliaments and congresses. We’ve already seen Cyrus, the Lord’s anointed, “my shepherd, the man who will do all my bidding,” who restores Jerusalem. By the time we get to Zerubbabel and Joshua they’re busy restoring, but during that time Cyrus dies. Cyrus is campaigning and dies in battle, and the throne passes briefly to Cambyses, his son, who doesn’t like the Jews at all.

Somewhere in here the Jews’ enemies send word saying, “These evil people are trying not only to rebuild the temple” – they don’t normally mention that – “but they’re rebuilding the city,” and the great phrase, “It’s a bad city.” Words failed them. They hadn’t read Strunk & White or anything.

Cambyses had been working in Egypt, conquering Egypt, and while Cyrus was dead another possibly son, possibly imposter – they were kind of not sure at the time, and historians have gone back and forth ever since, but anyway a man named Bardiya takes the throne and claims to be Cyrus’s brother. But Cyrus’s general don’t believe him or don’t want to believe him or just want him out of the way, depending on who you believe, and the chief of these is a man named Darius – like but not the same as the Darius of the lion’s den. This is a different Darius. He's a general and he comes and takes control of the throne.

It’s during this time that the letter reaches him and accuses Jerusalem of all kinds of horrible things. He’s really busy consolidating power. He hasn’t got time to listen to this. It sounds like a plausible threat, but probably from Cyrus and others he has learned a lesson about the laws of the Medes and the Persians. He hadn’t learned it quite well enough, we’re going to see, but he does put a tagline on it. “Tell them to stop rebuilding until I say otherwise,” and then he goes about his business.

As we read in Haggai and Zechariah, what happened with the Jewish people at this point is they went into a funk. They said, “Oh. Well, this isn’t going anywhere. We can’t rebuild the temple. We can’t do anything.” He hadn’t said don’t rebuild the temple. He said don’t rebuild the city, and they had been emphasizing building their own nice homes more than building the city. In fact, they were taking some of the wood that Cyrus had dedicated for the temple and building their homes with it.

This is where Haggai comes in and says, “What’s this all about? You know what? God is already smiting you with poverty and pestilence in the land and upon your fields because you’re supposed to be building the house of God and you’re wanting every one to build your own house. Stop it. Get your act together and do the right thing.”

Hindsight is 20/20 but it seems like this could have been a wake-up call to be like, “Oh, yeah, we won’t rebuild the city. We’ll do what we were supposed to do.”

The interesting is that once the prophet pointed it out they did, and that’s one of the great glories of the restoration. So many times the people do their traditional fall into sin, but when they’re rebuked they say, “Oh rats! Yes, you’re so right. We’ll go do what God said now,” and they do.

That’s so weird. Why now?

Because the restoration era in many respects is an era of greater glory and greater grace. Messiah is at hand and the streams of light are getting brighter. There’s more scripture. The Holy Spirit has more tools to work with, as it were, full of pictures of Messiah drawn by the prophets. Beyond that, it’s God’s good pleasure.

So eventually these people push the issue again with Darius. “They’re rebuilding the temple!” and this time Darius has time to listen, and he does. In Ezra 5 we have the enemies of the Jews. These are the Gentiles who live roundabout, among them the Samaritans, coming and saying, “Who commanded you to build this house and make up the wall? Give us some names here.”

This time the elders of the Jews didn’t back down and force the matter back to Darius. So the enemies send another letter and say –

Be it known unto the king, that we went into the province of Judea, to the house of the great God, which is builded with great stones, and timber is laid in the walls, and this work goeth fast on, and prospereth in their hands.

Then asked we those elders, and said unto them thus, Who commanded you to build this house, and to make up these walls? We asked their names also, to certify thee, that we might write the names of the men that were the chief of them.

And thus they returned us answer, saying, We are the servants of the God of heaven and earth, and build the house that was builded these many years ago, which a great king of Israel builded and set up. But after that our fathers had provoked the God of heaven unto wrath, he gave them into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, the Chaldean, who destroyed this house, and carried the people away into Babylon. But in the first year of Cyrus the king of Babylon the same king Cyrus made a decree to build this house of God.

And so it goes. The letter ends with, “Would you please check on this? We don’t believe these guys. Would you see if there actually was a decree?” because if it was a decree, a law of the Medes and Persians, they already have all they need. So the enemies are hoping that they’re lying, they’re making it up or exaggerating or something.

Darius, faced with, “Oh, you’re asking about royal precedent. I guess I have to listen to that one, don’t I?” orders a search and it’s interesting how difficult it is for them to find the document. It appears twice in scripture, so you would think, but that seems to be not the one that got filed. That one is a little different and a little more specific as to how the house is to be rebuilt, but it does bear Cyrus’s seal and signature. So having read this, Darius says –

Let the work of this house of God alone. Let the governor of the Jews and the elders of the Jews build this house of God in his place. Moreover I make a decree what ye shall do to the elders of these Jews for the building of this house of God…

They wanted to do something to the elders. “I’m going to tell you what you can do to those elders.”

…that of the king's goods, even of the tribute beyond the river, forthwith expenses be given unto these men, that they be not hindered.

“And all you guys? You’re going to pay for this out of your own tribute that would have come to us, but we’re directing it so you’re going to pay for the rebuilding process. Thank you very much.”

That they may offer sacrifices of sweet savours unto the God of heaven, and pray for the life of the king and of his sons.

Persian nationalists? Oh, you didn’t see that. A friend of ours sent around a Lutheran satire video.

Oh, I saw it.

Which one was it? I don’t know if I saw it.

It’s about Christian nationalism. It’s viewed as a game show with the full force and brilliance of Lutheran sarcasm and irony. I’m not going to go a whole lot further with this.

It’s a great comedy sketch.

Unless you’re its target, it’s fantastic.

As you were reading I was going, “Wow, there would be so many people today that would balk at the fact that the government is paying for the building of the temple,” and not just their government, it’s a foreign pagan government, and in return they’re supposed to pray for those people. So many people today would have said, “No, no, government money can’t ever come and help the church.”

And most of those people, oddly enough, would be Christians, which is the point of view of this little video. Three people on the game show come up with reasons why there should never be any connection between the Church and the State, even to the point of the Church barely existing as the Church because you know…that. You can look that up and find out about it.

Here what is interesting of course is that Ezra does not throw up his hands, or Zerubbabel or Joshua don’t go back and say, “Wait, Your Majesty, we certainly appreciate the sentiment, but you can’t do that. Separation of Church and State. We’ll come up with the money somehow. God will provide.” They don’t do that. They take every cent they get. But Darius goes further. They need to be praying for the king and his sons.

Also I have made a decree, that whosoever shall alter this word, let timber be pulled down from his house, and being set up, let him be hanged thereon and let his house be made a dunghill for this. And the God that hath caused his name to dwell there destroy all kings and peopl, that shall put to their hand to alter and to destroy this house of God which is at Jerusalem. I Darius have made a decree. Let it be done with speed.

A couple things there. First of all he does not include “…until I say otherwise.” He’s firmly committed. Second, he acknowledges God not simply as a hypothetical concept or as one of many possibilities within his polytheistic empire. This is a God whom he expects to act in history, a God from whom he expects divine favor. And third, he does not talk about “so that God will bless Persia.” He turns the other way. “Let God destroy all of his enemies in history and time.”

Again, so many people today would say, “Oh, he had such an infantile understanding of the God of Israel.” No, he didn’t. That’s exactly the way God works in history.

There’s something almost prophetic about what he says here, thinking of someone who’s going to come most likely in his reign, Haman, who will attempt to do this and he will be hanged from something he built on his own property by his own house. So there’s a real circle that we see where Darius actually in many ways fulfills this, the things that he claims for God.

I love that “with speed” at the end. It’s so indefinite, but when the king of the world says, “Do this fast,” I think things might get done pretty quick.

This is a good place to segue to what Rachel was just talking about. The chronology of the Persian empire is somewhat confusing because we started by not taking the Bible seriously and we went to the Greeks and looked how they laid things out and the names they used for the Persian kings, because they had more immediate contact in some respects because they were fighting them. You want to go to the enemies of the people and find out what they think of them, because that’s going to be good.

Right. They’re going to give them all their right names and everything too.

They’re great with names.

The Greeks do recognize an Artaxerxes or two who come much later, so the assumption is, “Oh, same name so Artaxerxes is later, so Esther is later and Nehemiah is later,” but if we start instead with scripture we find out that particularly when it has to do with letter-writing, if you read the text very carefully – it takes some careful reading; it’s not necessarily obvious. On the surface it’s more confusing than anything, but it seems this Darius is given the name Darius and then Artaxerxes and then Ahasuerus.

Biblical scholars have debated back and forth over who’s who and who these names go to and who should be included and who’s out. We were just in the reign of Darius in chapter 6 when all of this happened. In fact, in 6:14 it says –

And the elders of the Jews builded and they prospered through the prophesying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of Iddo. And they builded and finished it, according to the commandment of the God of Israel, and according to the commandment of Cyrus, and Darius, and Artaxerxes king of Persia.

The Greeks would say, “That was several generations later.” Well, the temple was long done by then. But what if we put in in place of ‘and,’ ‘even’ or ‘that is to say,’ as we’ve discussed before, at which point Darius is Artaxerxes, and when we go to the next chapter, Ezra 7, it reads –

Now after these things, in the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia…

We can look at the dating of the years and it’s just one year later. We’ve only moved a year, even though the king’s name has changed. People have said, “So lots later…” but we’ve gone from one year to the next year. Anyway, I’m going to take the position that this Artaxerxes and therefore Ahasuerus and therefore the story of Esther fits just about here.

Yes. So we come to Esther and, as you’ve said, it’s likely in that same time period. One thing to note that’s of interest, just jumping back for a second, is that the beginning of Ezra also gives us a list of the leaders that first went with Zerubbabel and Joshua. Among those names we do find Nehemiah and Mordecai.

When we’re first in Nehemiah we also see Nehemiah particularly mention that the queen is sitting there with the king that he’s talking to, so there seems to be a lot of overlap of Nehemiah and Mordecai being about the same age, and Esther being there when Nehemiah makes his plea, so that’s a little more background of how all these things are overlapping and interacting with each other.

In order to get Esther there to potentially be a support for Nehemiah when he wants to go back later, we find the king is celebrating. He’s been doing a multi-day feast and at the end of it he decides he wants to show off his wife, Vashti, who is known for being very beautiful. And in a place where the king’s word is law and you don’t change it, he calls her to come out and she refuses.

Nowadays we would say, “Oh yeah, woman power! Way to go! Show the man!” but back then that was treason. She was being openly rebellious, which we should not praise, and she receives actually a much lesser sentence than she should have probably. She is just basically banished from him and divorced from him rather than being executed.

It’s interesting that we’re not given any of her reasoning. Does she find this degrading or dehumanizing or is she just spiteful? We don’t know.

You could write a whole story about who Vashti is as the unsung feminist of the Persian empire. The point is she’s more of the inciting moment that gets her out of the way. After he’s sent her away he becomes sad and wishes that maybe he hadn’t done that, but he can’t change his decree.

He was like three days into a party at that point, so his judgement might not have been the best.

And that’s the thing. He probably had had a lot of wine and thought, “This is a great idea,” and she’s going, “This is a stupid idea.” But regardless, kings probably made a lot of their decisions under the influence of alcohol.

These are Persians, remember.

Yes. In those days they loved their luxury. Eventually as he becomes sad, his counselors come up with the idea of what we would call a beauty pageant, which is a nice term for what they did, which was to pretty much gather up any pretty unmarried girl that they could, send her through a year of preparation of being soaked in good oils and scents and all of these things to make her absolutely as beautiful as she possibly could be, and to go spend one night with the king. And then unless he decided that she was the one he wanted to marry, she would be sent off to the harem to live in seclusion while being well provided for, but never seeing her husband or ever having children or any such thing ever again.

In the middle of this we see a young girl who is an orphan and being raised by her uncle Mordecai. At that point her name is Hadassah, but she’s given a new name when she’s taken into this program of Esther instead of Hadassah, so she goes through all of the process.

She’s humble to actually do this and not claim that it’s against her religion or anything, but Mordecai does warn her not to share who her people are. She again listens to him, so we’re already seeing a contrast between her and Vashti, of being obedient and submissive. She goes along quietly, not rebelling.

In the process of all this the Lord causes her to find favor with the king, so she actually is the chosen bride, but in the middle of this we see another conflict happening. We see that initial relationship started and then we jump over to Mordecai, her uncle, and a man who is high up in the king’s government named Haman.

Haman, as we know, is a lingering Amalekite, which takes us way back all the way to the exodus of the people from Egypt, where the Amalekites are one of the first groups to be attacking Israel, and thus bring judgement and condemnation on them, that they should be completely obliterated, so we see multiple campaigns against them at different points. This was one of the issues with Saul, where he doesn’t actually kill all of them like he’s supposed to.

As soon as we find that out we should have an expectation that there’s going to be a conflict there between him and the Jews, because they are old enemies and old rivals.

As a side note, as someone who has studied more modern Middle Eastern history, many that are in more of the dispensationalist or Christian Zionist camps tend to pick up this story and they cast Iran in the role of Haman, because he was a leader in the Persian empire, and thus say that today as Iran is confronting Israel it’s another Haman vs Mordecai and Esther story. But Haman was not Persian. We’ll just put it there, so it’s not the same thing. There are a lot of different issues that Israel has today, but they no longer have this protection that the Israelites had back then when they were waiting for Messiah, so the conflict is very different.

Moving forward we find that Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman at one point. Again we could speculate exactly why he chose to do that, but whether it’s because Haman was an Amalekite or there was a reason that he believed he shouldn’t be bowing to him for some reason, it incites another conflict of Haman being so affronted or downcast. It’s one of those things where one single person just completely puts his nose out of joint and starts this whole issue. He looks for a way to basically destroy the Jews because Mordecai has affronted him and caused him to remember all of his hatred of them, his desire to eliminate their people.

So we get the story of him casting lots for – how many days does he do it? It’s somewhere upward of 300-something days. He basically is looking for a day when he could propose to the king to have a war against the Jews. He casts the lots for yes/no. This day? No. This day? No. This day? No. This day? No.

300 times God said no.

Yes, and he didn’t stop, he kept going, being very persistent. So he gets his ‘yes’ day 300 days in the future and uses some vague language to tell the king that there’s this terrible people who are rebellious and are going to cause him lots of trouble, so he needs to allow everybody the right to attack them, destroy them, and take their stuff.

The king unfortunately does not see through it because Haman is one of his chief advisors, and so puts his Persian seal on this law. It then falls to Esther as the only one that can potentially go to the king to try to plea for her people, which nobody knows are her people, including Haman. But to go to the king when not summoned is considered again rebellious and presumptive, unless the king chooses to show favor by extending his scepter.

Esther does a lot of praying and fasting and preparing, but as the famous line goes that if she does not, the Lord will raise up someone else to help, but perhaps she’s been put in this unusual position for such a time as this. So trusting in the providence of God, trusting her life to the Lord, she goes to him and sees that golden scepter extended.

The king understands something big must be going on for Esther to take this risk, as she hadn’t seen him in over a month. Esther goes through multiple rounds of extending when she’s going to ask the king. She invites him and Haman to a feast. He says, “Okay, what do you want?” at the first feast and she says, “I want you to come to a second feast the next day.”

There is one thing that you skipped over and that I always skip over that becomes really important. It’s like two verses. Somewhere in here Mordecai finds out that a couple of chamberlains got ticked off at the king and are going to lay hands on him and kill him. He reports it to Esther, who certifies it in Mordecai’s name. These two men are apprehended, interrogated, and executed, and the thing is written in the chronicles of the kings and forgotten. Nothing is done. No reward for Mordecai, so that’s hanging out there as just a weird thing, as we come back and find out.

Coming back from the second banquet Haman is upset because Mordecai is still there and not bowing, and he needs to do something to Mordecai right away. I’ll hand it back to you.

His wife, again a wonderful wife in scripture, gives him the idea of building the gallows, and pretty much going to the king and getting Mordecai executed. But at the same time that he is there for building these wonderfully tall gallows in his own backyard –

When we say gallows we should clarify that the cause of death is impalement, not hanging by the neck.

Yes. At the same time, in the Lord’s providence, the king can’t sleep. Maybe we should all remember this when we have insomnia and we feel like, “Why can’t I sleep?”

The Lord would have you read something.

I speak as one who has lots of insomnia. Anyway, he asks for something to be read. “Read the old chronicles because certainly that will put me to sleep.” But in the process he hears the old testimony that had been forgotten about what happened with Mordecai and how he saved the king’s life. He asks, “Has anything been done for this man who saved my life?”

“Uhh, no.”

So the next morning when he gets up, and Haman comes in all ready to make his request against Mordecai, the king starts with, “What should I do for the man that I wish to greatly honor?” and of course Haman thinks it’s him.

“Oh, he loves me!”

Yes. “I am self-centered so it must be about me!” So Haman gives this lavish description of what should happen, he assumes to himself. The king then turns it on Haman and says, “Great. Go do that to Mordecai,” which must make Haman all the angrier, and therefore he’s in a great emotional and mental state when he goes to the next banquet with Esther that evening.

Esther finally reveals what is going on to the king and what she needs by saying, “This is my people and they are going to be slaughtered, basically a genocide against them. I don’t know what to do because, king, it was your decree that did this, but truly it was the man Haman that is trying to destroy us. What should we do, king?”

The king weeps for a moment because he’s angry, and in that moment Haman decides to make a plea to the queen, but in the process, because they’re sitting low on couches, he ends up basically falling on her legs, which does not look great when the king comes back in and accuses him. “What are you trying to do now to my queen?” He is then immediately taken off to go his own house and be executed on his own device.

The king then honors Mordecai, and Mordecai becomes one of his chief advisors and is able to create a loophole, if you will, or an extra stipulation in the law, because they can’t change the law. It basically says that the king approves of the Jews fighting back against this day of slaughter, which demonstrates to most people that king is actually in favor of the Jews, and if you want to be on his side you should be on the Jews’ side, even as stories of Mordecai and such spread as well. So the day that could have been their destruction becomes a day of salvation for them.

And for many others who convert.

Yes, many others then convert. There’s also a Jewish festival commemorating this called Purim because of the casting of lots. To this day the Jews still celebrate that and it’s one of their days where they do gift-giving and things like that. It’s very celebratory.

There are costumes.

And they have fun little flags that they wave around, and masks and such.

The reason that Esther is so important, and a lot of Christians strangely miss this, is that the promise of Messiah is on the line here. We’ve read through the Old Testament. We’ve seen the conflict between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman fall out again and again. Usually it’s one person chasing down his godly counterpart, or one nation taking on Israel. Here we have one man trying to destroy every single Jew on the planet. That’s kind of big.

Satan, if he’s listening, and he is, can probably figure out “tribe of Judah” but why take chances. “Let’s just get them all. Let’s eliminate the worship of Jehovah from the planet.”

“We know God is very sneaky.”

“We don’t want to leave God any loopholes. There might be something we’ve missed here.”

He’s getting desperate. He can read a clock and a calendar. He knows that the prophesied time is coming. Whatever he’s going to do, it has to be big, bad, and final, so this is a very important piece of scripture along those lines.

I’d like to point out that it’s so important that this is a work of history. It’s not a morality tale. We can go back and forth about Vashti and Esther and Mordecai and consider whether their actions are worthy of imitation in this or that respect, but the fact is there’s a whole lot of gray here. God does not hold up Esther, least of all, as a moral example. She was in this talent show and she won. That’s not a glowing moral recommendation.

Especially considering the talent involved. And Mordecai’s prohibition, “Don’t tell them you’re a Jew,” which means don’t speak about the God of Israel to this man…

That doesn’t seem in line with what we would think of as an act of courageous faith.

No. When it comes down to, “The promise is at stake and you’re the one who’s closest. Go risk your life, although I’ve told you exactly the opposite at this point,” she says okay and her humility and her faith kick in.

But you’re right that it’s easy for us, both as Christians who are tempted to moralism, and people who’ve come recently out of the 20th century where everything has to have a psychological interpretation and you have to examine the motives of all the characters – like we can read hearts. When did that happen?

In the absence of any clear commendation from God we’re often left with, “What? Why? What were you doing?”

Because in fact God is the one who did it. He’s the one who accomplished the salvation. It was not due to the virtue of any singular person.

It’s significant at this point that the things he uses are insomnia and a beauty contest, and the faith eventually of one bold young woman. There’s no flood covering the world. There’s no rivers turning to blood and frogs swarming over the land and locusts devouring crops and the sun going black – none of that. These are the simplest and in some ways silliest ways.

“If you were going to save the world, how would you go about it?”

“Well, first I’d make sure the king couldn’t sleep, so let’s have him eat something really hot that night. And let’s have his wife be stubborn so that he gets rid of her and gets a new one.”

“Maybe she shouldn’t tell people who she is right away.”

“Nah, nah, she’s got to be the hero. She’s got to come in and tell the king where he gets off right from the start.”

She’s hardly Wonder Woman.

“And then she can summon power from the stars and star fleets.” No, she throws a couple banquets and eventually gets her request out. This is not how Hollywood would write this story. This is not how most of us would write this story. But in the end it is a major breakthrough because the gospel does start going to Gentile peoples around. A lot of the Gentiles were told to become Jews for fear of what’s going on here, and there’s no reason not to take that in the best sense possible. This is one of the weirdest acts of evangelism in the history of the world.

Also in Ezekiel there is a description of a battle that more or less conforms to the constraints of what had to happen, because the enemies of the Jews did not back down. Many who might have sided against the Jews didn’t and supported them, but a lot of people simply didn’t care. They hated the Jews so much that they were going to risk the king’s wrath on the other side and try to kill these people. War ensued and it would have carried certainly to Jerusalem because that’s where most of the Jews were.

In Ezekiel’s description of this battle, he uses a bit of figurative language. He speaks of Gog and Magog, but the nations he describes are those within the Persian empire, not from the ends of the earth, not people coming from the Aztec empire and China. It was people they knew, but beyond the normal boundaries of what they had fought before. They’re coming into the land at a time when God’s people are at peace living in the unwalled city, and God intervenes and destroys the enemies, which is historically what happened.

Then in Ezekiel’s prophecy the restoration covenant ensues with its limited glory, because the rebuilt temple that Ezekiel sees is a temple. When John sees the new Jerusalem, the temple is the lamb. Ezekiel sees a temple and he sees water pouring forth one way to the Dead Sea. This is setting us up for what’s coming for a very powerful transformation, but it’s not the final one just yet. We’re getting closer, closer, and closer.

One thing that still has to happen is Jerusalem still really doesn’t have functional walls, and after this battle it really doesn’t have functional walls. We’re still in the same king’s reign when his cupbearer, also a Jew named Nehemiah, gets word that the gates and walls of Jerusalem are in horrible condition. This is not something that happened generations earlier. This is something that’s just happened because he’s upset about it.

It’s not like, “Oh, well, things are still the same. I should go cry now.” It was like, “Ah! Progress was happening and it’s all set back and we’ve lost it. Everything is horrible!” and he starts praying. This is Nehemiah chapter 1. He not only prays immediately, but he sets about with prayers for a few months and comes up with a plan. It’s another one of those like, “You’re kidding. That’s the plan?”

“You’re going to go to the king and be sad. That’s your plan?”

“Yeah, that’s the plan. I’m going to go be sad.” You’re not supposed to be. Being sad in the king’s presence is kind of like being sad in God’s presence.

It seems inappropriate.

It’s inappropriate, yes, before a human king, a sinful man.

Rachel, when you were in France did you experience this? You told about how saying hello twice to the same person is extremely rude because you didn’t remember the first time you encountered them apparently. “You said bonjour already.”

I don’t know if I heard that one specifically, but that sounds very French.

So Nehemiah plots it out and goes before the king and is deliberately sad and the king calls him on it. Nehemiah says, “And I prayed to the God of heaven.” I’m sure he didn’t get on his knees and raise his hands and go through some kind of formal prayer. He just said a prayer.

And said unto the king, Let the king live forever. Why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers' sepulchres, lieth waste, and the gates thereof are consumed with fire?

Eventually the king gets that he’s trying to ask for something. “What do you want? What is your request?”

“Well, I want you to send me back to rebuild the walls.”

“And here’s a detailed plan of what it would take.”

“Here’s the task map, the agenda, the charts, the cost analysis.” Unlike Ezra, who I sort of skipped over and who had gone before, he’s got it all dialed in. He’s got it figured out.

So the king there – and the text says the queen also sitting beside him – there’s only one queen we care about, as Rachel mentioned earlier, and that’s Esther, so she’s there to kind of poke her husband. “Oh, that city, that God. Yeah, we’re going to do that,” and so he gets permission.

I just mentioned Ezra so we should go back and pick up Ezra. Ezra takes place while the whole story of Esther is being played out. He is a scribe of the law of the God of heaven. He’s a priest and he asks for permission to go back to Jerusalem and teach God’s law. He again gets imperial sanction, approval from the king to go do that and to enforce it even beyond the bounds of Israel.

It’s another thing like, “What? A pagan king telling you to enforce your law on people who aren’t even believers? What’s that all about?” That’s called the Word of God. And Ezra, rather than complaining to God about the over-much zeal of this man, thanks God for the help he gets.

So Ezra is going back with this great plan to lead revival and teach the Word of God, and he no sooner gets back than he’s told, “All the leaders are marrying pagan women. You probably should fix that,” and that’s how the book ends. Ezra is conducting this great divorce proceeding and he never gets, in that book, to do what he came to do. Then we’re back.

I think that’s the only divorce that’s spoken of positively in scripture, very unusual.

They married without their fathers’ approvals and so their marriages get annulled. There is precedent for this, because again the promise is at stake. If all of these people marry pagans, what happens to the next generation? What will they learn? Will they even learn to speak Hebrew?

So Nehemiah comes back, looks the situation over, and goes and tells people, “I’ve got royal support. We’re going to rebuild the walls.” Everyone is excited.

I think at this point we can fast forward a little. Nehemiah succeeds in his project, rebuilds the walls, and dedicates the walls. This is new. So the whole city now is a holy city. It has gained the sanctity of the temple grounds themselves, so this is a step forward.

Finally, Ezra gets to bring out the Word of God and lead a great revival. He preaches, and for centuries now Protestants have taken that preaching service as sort of a precedent and background for how Protestant should go forth, at least in part.

There’s a pulpit, which simply means he stood up high. There’s the reading of the Word of God. There’s explanation of the Word of God and “Here’s what the Hebrew meant,” because at this point people weren’t really speaking Hebrew anymore. They were speaking Aramaic, which is similar but not the same. “In the original Hebrew this means…” so like Presbyterian preaching, “…and here’s the application of the thing.”

Unlike many Presbyterian Reformed services there was some “amen’ing” going on, and as the people got convicted of their sins they began to weep, which is understandable, and this is where that famous verse comes in where Ezra and Nehemiah tell people, “No, no, this is the day of rejoicing because you’ve heard God’s Word and you understand it. You need to rejoice, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” Then we have the account of some of Nehemiah’s civil reforms to try to protect the worship of God, to protect the Sabbath, to protect the people again from intermarrying with pagans and all that.

Malachi is preaching about this time and has God’s Word from that perspective, and the Old Testament comes to an end and the prophecies fall silent and there are no more miracles. In fact, the last real miracle that I can remember is Daniel in the lions’ den, and before that the three Hebrew children in the fire.

So we’ve re-established godly worship. The books that explain that re-establishment have been written and added to the canon. God’s people are spread throughout the empire, worshiping in their own little synagogues, their church-like assemblies where they read the Word of God and someone preaches a sermon based on it, and they pray and they chant psalms and they bear witness to their Gentile neighbors as they live in an ungodly world. Sounds familiar.

Meanwhile the Persian empire goes on. This Darius that we’ve been talking about, if you’re reading the Greek sources and the traditional western histories you will know Darius, but not from the Bible. You can probably read any secular history, and whether it’s world history or western history you will see Darius, but there will be absolutely no mention of his connection with the Bible.

What you’ll find out is that when he was trying to maintain his borders – and how this is phrased really depends on very little because the whole west is pro-Greece, so they say he threatened the Greek peoples in their freedom and so they retaliated.

Basically, some of the Greek settlers or people who had been there for a while actually along the coast of Asia Minor decided that they were going to foment a little bit of rebellion here, and cities in the Greek mainland decided to back them up – for instance Sparta and Athens.

Darius sent word and said, “Stop that. No, you guys are in the way. This is my empire. Go away, and if you’re not going to go away then we’re going to deal with you.” He sent ambassadors requesting samples of soil and water, which was a way of saying, “I own you, I own your land, I own your water, I own everything.”

Many of the Greek city-states complied, but Athens and Sparta didn’t. Sparta threw the ambassadors into a well and said, “There’s all the dirt and water you need.” The Athenians threw them into some kind of gorge and made the same cute comment, so the battle begins.

That’s where the Persians enter western history in traditional sources. They ran into the Greeks, and of course the Greeks are our heroes. The first battle between the Persian empire and the Greek city-states is the Battle of Marathon, and we can talk more about that next time.

I think it’s appropriate here to again emphasize that the Bible has a really high opinion of the Persian kings to this point. They’ve promoted the worship of God. They’ve rebuilt the temple. They have as their advisor a Jewish queen, a Jewish butler or security guard, a Jewish vizir, the second in command, Mordecai, and they keep passing laws that are favorable to God’s people. If the American federal government did this, everybody on both sides would be up in arms. “You shouldn’t be interfering.”

This is how the Bible presents these people, and although at times they are intemperate, it’s no more so than anybody else. Darius had some problems, but compare it to Nebuchadnezzar. “I’m going to make an image and you’re all going to worship it or you’re going to be burned to pieces.” Darius doesn’t do anything like that.

The Persian empire by-and-large when they conquered people left them alone. They had to pay their taxes and provide soldiers and maybe make a few concessions here and there, but they didn’t try to rewrite the nature of mankind. Their view of the new world order was kinder and gentler.

Then you get to the Greeks and we rewrite the ideals of the Enlightenment back into Greek history and say, “Since being rational since the Enlightenment means this to us, surely the Greeks, from whom we think we learned this, would have been exactly like us – rational, common sense, even-tempered, champions of liberty, always in the right.” So when they encounter the Persians, the Greeks said the Persians were given to luxury and to effeminacy and to worldliness. “The Greeks obviously are right. The Persians were just Oriental despotism.” They’re descended from Japheth. That’s not the Orient.

So we rewrite the histories forward in terms of our complete misunderstanding of the Greeks. We look at every victory of the Greeks over the Persians as one more step in western liberty, and then forget things like the battle against Sisera or this battle here against Gog and Magog, which were far more key to western liberty because they’re far more key to the survival of the promise.

From here next time we can finish up our contact of the Greeks with the Persians, and we’ll take it as far as Alexander. Then we need to back up and look at the Greeks, because everybody else does. We need to take some time with them and their philosophy, because like it or not, yes, they are a decided influence on western history.

Yes, huge. We’ll do that next time. Shall we wrap up with some rapid-fire recommendations?

I’ll go first for once – Crime and Punishment. I recommend this largely because my kids are reading it in school, and it’s been a while since I’ve read it, and if I’m going to ask them intelligent questions I need to keep my memory fresh. So I started re-reading it and it was okay.

We basically have to read 20 pages a night, and last night I zipped through the 20 and said, “What? I’m done? I want to know what happens next. I want to know the next part of the story. I kind of know what’s next but this is so well-written and so fast-paced.”

It takes a while and you have to get into it, and you get to the point where you like all the characters except one of them is a murderer. What are you supposed to do with that? Oh, and another one is a prostitute. What are you supposed to do with that? But these other people seem nice enough, and this is a great story and things keep coming out of nowhere and it’s a ghost story and…anyway.

It’s another instance of an important story that is decidedly not a morality tale.

It is not a morality tale, not in the least. So have fun. If you want a good place to start in Russian literature, I think this would be it.

I’ll recommend Dracula Daily. We were talking a little bit about this before we started recording. Dracula Daily is a Substack that you can subscribe to. Every day in the book Dracula by Bram Stoker – it’s sort of an epistolary journey format so it’s like, “May 19. Here I am doing this thing. I’m still stuck in Castle Dracula and these guys are really freaking me out.”

The author of the Substack didn’t write the book, but whoever is managing the Substack just sends you that day’s happenings in the novel Dracula, so by the time you get to November you’ve read the whole story in these little bite-sized chunks that show up in your email.

I love the book Dracula. It’s slow, so probably in your email inbox a few minutes a day is the best way to read it. It’s delightful. It’s scary. There are adventures. There’s good vs evil. There’s a wonderful love story. It’s really great.

I’m going to go a totally different direction and recommend that when you need some cleaning products for your home, look up how to make them for yourself.

Amen!

I know Emily started this a few years ago, and I’ve done it more recently with making my own laundry soap. When I got pregnant I went, “Oh, I don’t really want to use regular cleaners. Can I make a cleaner? Oh yeah, I just need water and vinegar and a little dish soap.” Recently we had spider issues. “How can we get rid of spiders? Oh, just some water and essential oil.”

I’ve been amazed at how simple a lot of them can be. Most of it tends to be water, so I encourage you to start thinking about ways that you can make some of those for yourself, because they tend to be a lot better for your home and much cheaper. That’s been one of my recent revelations.

I love that because part of what makes the stuff on the store shelves so expensive and complicated chemically is that it has to be shelf stable because they want it to be available for a long time. But if you’re going through stuff you don’t need it to last forever, which means you can do the less stable version with baking soda and vinegar.

I’ve never been an essential oils person, but finding out like, “Oh, the reason you use lavender in everything is because it’s a natural antibacterial, and tea tree oil is a natural disinfectant,” – it’s life changing.

“Why did no one ever tell me this?”

Yes. I thought it had to be bleach, which just smells nasty. That’s a good reco.

Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. A big thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling.

If you’d like to get in touch with us, Dear Listener, you can send us an email at [email protected]. That is the best way to get hold of us and we would love to hear from you.

If you would like to receive our transcripts in your email inbox, perhaps along with Dracula Daily, you can subscribe to our Substack, which is called Halting Toward Zion. I don’t know how you find a Substack. I think you just search it. I’ve always been linked to them by other people. I think you probably Google it. That’s the answer to many things in life.

Thank you so much for listening. Hope to see you next time.