Bible Commentary - Esther 3

In this chapter, Haman is introduced and convinces the king to kill all the Jews.

Haman is the fourth and final major character in this story, besides Esther, the king and Mordecai.

What do we learn about Haman?  First, we learn he is an “Agagite” (v. 1).  This most likely means that he is a descendant of king Agag of the Amalekites (See 1 Samuel 15).  They have an ancient blood feud with Israel dating all the way back to the Exodus, which the death of Agag was supposed to have resolved.  As we can see, an heir survived and thus the feud lives on with him.

Second, we learn that Haman has somehow gained favor with the king and has been promoted to chief advisor, over all his officials.  We don’t know why, but Haman must have really pleased the king somehow and is now his second in command.

Third, we learn that Haman is a proud and insecure man.  Verse 5 tells us that when Haman learned a single man was not bowing down to him, he was filled with rage.  This is not the attitude of a man who is content with his life.  Haman is acting like somebody who wants to be the greatest, most powerful and feared man on earth, and when he learns that there is someone who does not respect him, it cuts him right to the heart.

When Haman learns that Mordecai is a Jew is reawakens the deep animosity between the Amalekites and Israelites, and Haman resolves to destroy all the Jews in the empire.  The king, as always, goes along with his advisor’s suggestion and agrees to destroy the Jews.  The language in v. 11 is a bit confusing, but my understanding is that “the silver is yours” is a conventional phrase that indicates the king’s assent to the deal.  I don’t think it means the king is giving the money back to Haman, just that Xerxes accepts the offer.

One obvious question is, why does Mordecai refuse to bow to Haman?  There are several possibilities but I don’t know for sure.  One possibility is because Mordecai learns Haman is an Amalekite, and Mordecai refuses to bow to his enemy.  Another possibility is that Mordecai simply refuses to bow to anyone out of some sense of piety or because of his faith.  There is nothing in the Law that condemns bowing to a human authority, so long as you do not worship them or treat them like a god, but it’s possible that Mordecai viewed bowing to this man as similar to idolatry and therefore unlawful.

Greek Esther 13 includes a prayer of Mordecai where he explains in verse 12 that “it was not in insolence or pride or for any love of glory that I [refused to bow]... but I did this so that I might not set human glory above the glory of God, and I will not bow down to anyone but you.”  Although Greek Esther is not part of the Protestant canon and it’s unlikely that Greek Esther was written at the same time as Hebrew Esther (the normal version), I do think it’s interesting how this addition directly confirms the “piety” explanation.

In the final verse of this chapter, the king and Haman sit down to drink while the capital city, Susa, is “in confusion” over the order.  This is the third feast and it marks the beginning of the real drama in this story.  In the next chapter, the drama reaches Esther within the palace.

Bible Commentary - Esther 2

In this chapter, Esther becomes the queen.

In the beginning of the chapter, it’s as if king Xerxes was so distracted by everything with Vashti that he forgot he didn’t have a queen anymore.  “The king’s attendants” come forward with their business plan for how the king should select a new queen, basically by gathering up all of the prettiest young girls that they can find and having the king choose whichever one he likes the most.  This plan “pleased the king”.  I can only imagine it did; there aren’t many men who would not be pleased if they got to pick their favorite girl out of a hundred applicants.

Esther gets swept up in one of these dragnets, possibly against her will, but it doesn’t really matter because she does not get a choice about this.  We also learn that Esther is an orphan and is being raised by her uncle Mordecai.  The book does not dwell on it, but my readers should infer quite a bit of hardship in verses 6-7.

Mordecai, and all the people of his generation, were taken into exile by Nebuchadnezzar, and also Esther is an orphan.  It doesn’t specifically say that Esther was taken into exile too, so it’s possible she was born into exile after her parents were carried off to Babylon.  Either way, it should be clear that the Jews are being subjected to considerable hardship in their slavery; there may have been many such orphans as Esther.  However, I think we can also see a resiliency in such Jews as Mordecai.  Even though they live in slavery and hardship, men such as him are still laboring to protect and preserve their people.

In verse 9, we see that Esther quickly gains the favor of the chief eunuch Hegai.  In my opinion this is the first of God’s numerous interventions.  Similar to Ezra and Nehemiah, God’s deliverance in Esther largely occurs through “favor” with officials or through coincidences.

I mentioned this in my introduction, but I want to say again that there is a clear similarity to the story of Joseph (from the book of Genesis).  In the story of Joseph, we see him unfairly sold into slavery, but earning the favor of his master through hard work and excellence.  Joseph did not deserve to be sold into slavery; he didn’t deserve to be falsely accused of rape.  Joseph was mistreated, but he persevered, earned favor with his masters, and ultimately prevailed and saved his family from the famine.

Esther did not deserve to live in slavery.  I would say that she didn’t deserve to be taken into the king’s palace, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for her since even the royal concubines would have been well treated and fed.  She doesn’t have a choice and may not desire it, but all things considered it is not entirely a bad outcome for her.  Anyway, Esther earns the favor of Hegai.

One core difference between Joseph and Esther is how they earn favor.  In the case of Joseph, he earned favor through hard work and excellence.  This is what would have been expected of him.  In the case of Esther, we don’t know what she did to please Hegai but I suspect it was because Esther fulfilled Hegai’s expectations for a good woman.

What we see from Esther, more than anything else, is her obedience.  Verse 15 and v. 20 show Esther obeying the instructions of Hegai and Mordecai respectively.  I’m sure there’s more to it than simple obedience; Esther was probably a quiet, gentle and respectful person.  What the text emphasizes the most, however, is obedience.  I think the overall effect is to draw a contrast with Vashti, who was just recently deposed for being disobedient to the king.  I don’t want to emphasize it too much, because I think Esther is simply doing what she needs to do to survive, but I do think her obedience and humility are Esther’s most obvious traits and part of the reason why she is selected to be the new queen.  The other reason is God’s intervention on her behalf, though this intervention is only implied.

In verse 17, Esther obtains favor a second time, this time with the king, and she is promoted to be queen.  The king celebrates with another feast, the second feast of Esther.  This marks Esther’s ascension to power; it is a much quicker and simpler process than what Joseph went through, but it’s also much less complete.  Esther’s power is a soft power; she has the power of suggestion, not the power of command.  Everything in Esther’s life hinges on maintaining her relationship with the king, and in the previous chapter we saw the king view his queen primarily as a treasure to be displayed.  Esther’s challenge is to change the king’s perspective.

I don’t know what’s the right way to describe it.  Esther doesn’t have to earn the king’s respect the way that a man would earn the king’s respect, through competence or wisdom.  Instead, I think Esther needs to first establish her identity as a person to the king, and second, to establish herself as a person that the king likes.  We have already seen how vulnerable the king is to suggestion, so if Esther is ever in a conflict it won’t be with the king; it will be with one of the king’s advisors.  What will ultimately decide Esther’s fate is whether the king likes her more than her opponent.  So far we have seen Esther please the king and earn his favor, but this is one of the threads I will follow through the book.

If the first chapter introduced king Xerxes, clearly this chapter is the introduction of Esther.  In the next chapter, we are introduced to Haman, who is the villain of the story and the opponent that Esther will later face.

Bible Commentary - Esther 1

In this chapter, king Xerxes hosts a great feast and Vashti is deposed as queen.

This chapter is “setting the scene” for the events to follow.  It begins with a feast; if my readers recall, I mentioned in the introduction to Esther that there are seven feasts in the book and the feasts divide the text into distinct sections.  This is the first feast and it mainly serves to establish the king’s character and motivation for the king’s later association with Esther.

When I study king Xerxes (who is called Ahasuerus in the original text of Esther), I see three defining characteristics.  The first is that he is powerful.  Throughout the entire book, Xerxes remains in an almost god-like position in the story, where he is the ultimate judge of who lives and who dies.  We see in this chapter Xerxes bring out generous quantities of wine, and “displaying the riches of his royal glory” (v. 4).  Xerxes has all the power in this story and everyone else has power, glory and success to the extent that Xerxes grants it to them.  We know that God is the true power behind the throne, so a large part of the story is seeing how God directs the king’s heart to accomplish God’s purposes.

The second characteristic is that Xerxes is remarkably pliable.  I see it as kind of a paradox: even though Xerxes holds all of the power, he almost always does what other people tell him to do.  It is clear that Xerxes is used to receiving advice from his counselors; this is how he governs, but since Xerxes so rarely contradicts his advisors, it sometimes seems like Xerxes’s advisors have more influence than he does. 

The third and last characteristic is his affinity for partying, feasts, wine and women.

Xerxes never faces any conflict or challenges in the story, and since he is so receptive to the influence of others, his role is mostly neutral.  I imagine Xerxes to be like a neutral force of nature; he has power and he changes things, but he doesn’t have any obvious goals that he is trying to achieve, other than feasting and preserving his own power from the occasional threat.  For the most part, he doesn’t take anybody’s side.

Vashti only appears in this one chapter, since she is deposed at the end of it and stripped of her position.  I think one of the most interesting questions in this chapter is why did Vashti disobey the king’s command (v. 12)?  I think it’s so interesting because first, the text does not give us the reason why, second, because Vashti has so much to lose from disobeying the king, and third, because it implies there must have been some kind of conflict or grievance that the queen held against the king, but without saying as much openly.

It is clear from v. 12 that this is not “the queen was not able to fulfill the king’s command”.  It’s not “the queen did not receive the king’s command”.  The queen received it, understood it, was capable of it, and refused.  We don’t really know why she refused, so I’ll offer my best guess.  When we study the power dynamic between the king and queen Vashti, it is clear that the king wishes to present queen Vashti in the same way (and for the same reason) that he presented “the riches of his royal glory” (v. 4).  Basically the king is showing off all his money, jewelry, fine art, and so on, and towards the end here he also wants to “show off” his queen.  I don’t think the queen is a person in the king’s mind, I think she is yet another one of his possessions.

It seems likely that the king would regularly bring out the queen for exactly this purpose; it only appears in the story this time because the queen refused.  I think in the end the queen decided that she didn’t want to be a trophy, she wanted to be her own person with her own value.  A friend of mine described Vashti as being the first feminist; this is also speculative but not without reason.

Verses 17-22 make it clear that the king’s advisors certainly think Vashti is the first feminist.  They are afraid that if Vashti is not punished, then all the other women in the nation “will speak in the same way”, and “there will be much contempt and anger” (v. 18).  Really what this means is that wives will start talking back to their husbands, refusing to do things, and generally just expressing their opinions and attitudes.  The king and his advisors don’t want women to have opinions, they want them to be obedient.

I don’t know that Vashti wanted to be an example, but in her position as queen she has no choice, and the men respond accordingly.  Their solution is simple: divorce.  She did not fulfill her duty as they saw it, so the king removed her and we can presume he sent her back to live with her parents again.  It’s difficult to say what would have happened to her.  Being publicly rejected from such a high profile role, it’s hard to imagine who would have married her after that, even if the king would have allowed it.  She is not immediately killed, but I think it leaves her fate uncertain.  Since Vashti is no longer important to the story of Esther, she disappears from the book after this point.

The chapter concludes with a reminder that “every man should be the master in his own house”.  Like so many other places, this is not the bible telling us what the world ought to be like, it’s telling us how it was.  I hope my readers understand this is the culture into which Esther was born, and this is the culture in which her heroism is demonstrated.

In the next chapter, Esther herself appears in the story and she becomes queen.

Bible Commentary - Esther Introduction

And so we begin the book of Esther.  :)

Esther is the very last book of the OT historical section.  After this we begin the Wisdom Literature (Job through the Song of Songs).

I think at a high level, Esther shares many characteristics with the book of Ruth.  The most obvious is the central female protagonist, but it’s more than that.  Both Esther and Ruth are like period pieces drawn from their respective historical epochs.  They are written in the historical context of a specific era, but the events in each book do not particularly tie in with the rest of the bible.

Judged purely based on shared references, neither Ruth nor any events from the book of Ruth are mentioned anywhere else in the OT[1].  In a similar way, neither Esther nor any events from the book of Esther are mentioned anywhere else in the bible.  What this means is that if Ruth and Esther were both removed entirely from the bible, there would be no “gaps”, in the sense of later books assuming their audience’s familiarity with either Ruth or Esther.

Rather than “advancing” the history of Israel, I view both Ruth and Esther as narrative interludes, whose essential focus is not to tell us about what happened to Israel as a nation, but rather to teach us about the lives of individual people during their respective periods.  Other books in the OT focus on individuals, but only when those individuals are leaders of the nation who have the power to effect change at the national level.  For instance, the book of Joshua has much to say about the person of Joshua, but these are all events of national importance because Joshua is the national leader.  Same thing with Ezra and Nehemiah, who are both also national leaders.

Ruth and Esther are different because Ruth is a commoner (and a foreigner at that) and while Esther becomes queen, she is queen of Persia and not a community leader of Israel itself.

Both Ruth and Esther focus on individuals, but their intent is illustrative: in the case of both books, their authors are trying to show us what society was like at the time.  In the case of Ruth, we see Ruth and her family struggling to survive through the turbulent, lawless Judges period.  In the case of Esther, we see Esther and her uncle strive to maintain their cultural and religious identity while living in the midst of a hostile, foreign oppressor.

Focusing particularly on Esther, the historical context is virtually identical to Ezra and Nehemiah.  The Jewish people have been exiled from their homeland and they face a serious identity crisis.  The Tabernacle of Moses (and later, the temple) was central to the Jewish faith.  It was central to the sacrificial system and to the three mandated festivals.  All of this was part of the Law of Moses.  When the temple was destroyed and the people exiled, it meant that following the Law in the way it was originally intended becomes literally impossible.  Hence the identity crisis: what does it mean to be Jewish if it is impossible to obey the Law as it was originally meant?

As a secondary factor, but also tremendously important, the Jews were taken out of their homeland where they existed as a local majority, and moved to a foreign land where they exist as a local minority.  That is, before the exile an average Judean man could expect 9 out of every 10 of his neighbors to be the same ethnicity and religion as himself.  Now it’s the opposite; perhaps only 1 out of every 10 of his neighbors will be the same ethnicity as himself.  There are numerous implications.

First, it redefines in their conception what a “neighbor” is.  In the past, “neighbor” and “brother” could be used almost interchangeably.  Although I don’t want to be overly optimistic and say that the Israelites always lived at peace with each other, I do think there was a reasonable expectation that the people in a given town or community would protect and help each other.  The Law commands generosity towards one’s neighbor in part due to this expectation.  Foreigners were also supposed to be treated well because, as a minority in the Jewish homeland without social protection, they were more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.  Now it is the Jews who are living as foreigners, and they are vulnerable to the exact same exploitation and abuse that the Israelites had been ordered to eschew.

Second, in addition to the abuses and exploitation the Jews might receive, there is a significantly increased risk of cultural dilution via intermarriage and economic pressure.  Nehemiah 13:23-24 writes briefly about this challenge, but in the context of the Jewish exiles in Jerusalem.  It would have been a significantly greater risk in Persia where the Jewish exiles were a minority and surrounded by foreign people.  It is likely that a significant fraction of Jews in exile learned a foreign language (like Persian), married a foreign spouse, worshiped foreign gods, and while they and their descendants lived on, they ceased to maintain a Jewish identity, and therefore ceased to exist as a separate people.

In my opinion, the most important challenge faced by Esther and all the people of her generation is how to maintain their Jewish identity while surviving in the midst of a hostile, foreign power.  Even though the story never says it directly, I think this is the most important question of Esther’s generation and I think much can be learned by studying Esther with this perspective.

I believe that Esther’s “answer” to this question is similar to lessons we have drawn from Nehemiah: in a sentence, the Jewish people should engage with the hostile society, they should seek to cultivate influence and to excel in whatever role they attain, but that they should never forget their origin and people and maintain their “Jewishness” in every situation.  It is a pragmatic attitude, seeking to accrue power and wealth, but then using that power to benefit the Jewish community.  We saw this with Nehemiah, who was cupbearer to the king but then plied his influence to become governor of Judea and build the wall of Jerusalem.  I also see an analogy to Joseph the son of Jacob.  He was sold by his brothers into slavery, but then excelled in every position he got and was eventually promoted to second in command beside Pharaoh.  After garnering influence and power, Joseph used his position to provide food and land for his parents and brothers, bringing deliverance to the community of Israel during the famine.  Esther is much the same story.

Wrapped around this existential challenge, the book of Esther is a beautiful example of ancient Mideast storytelling.  The primary theme of Esther is reversal of fortune.  It is woven throughout the book in more places than I could mention here.  Esther contains a fairly standard narrative arc, with the first half of the book building up the tension in each chapter until it reaches the climax, deliverance is won and the book concludes happily for all the good guys.  The final conclusion of Esther is to explain why the Jews celebrate a festival called Purim, which is an annual festival celebrating the deliverance of the Jews that Esther won by her virtue and bravery.

The book of Esther has the usual cast of actors, with a protagonist, antagonist and various supporting characters.  I will discuss the characters as we see them emerge in the story.

My readers should also note the central role played by feasts.  There are seven feasts in the book of Esther and they are used to structure the narrative into distinct sections.

One of the most unique characteristics of Esther is that throughout the entire book it does not contain the word “LORD” or “God”.  Esther was one of the last books added to the biblical canon and this is one of the reasons why.  One theory I had heard was that Esther was written without references to God as a survival mechanism of sorts, because the Persian authorities might have destroyed a book that was openly dedicated to a god outside their religious system.  I don’t know if that is true but it seems plausible.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not mention the additions of Greek Esther.  Greek Esther is a document that may be unfamiliar to many Protestants, but possibly familiar to Catholic and Orthodox Christians.  Greek Esther is basically a Greek translation of the book of Esther, which formed part of the Septuagint, the ~1st century BCE Greek translation of the Hebrew old testament.  Amongst other differences, the Septuagint contained several additions to the book of Esther that are not included in the traditional Hebrew version of the same book.  These Greek additions are most likely an expansion on the Hebrew “original” text and the work of a later author, though it is difficult to estimate the date of both the Hebrew original as well as the later Greek additions.  I don’t plan to comment on the Greek additions themselves, but since the additions to Esther themselves date to at least the 3rd century BCE, I think they provide an invaluable perspective on how ancient Jews may have interpreted and viewed the book of Esther.

One of the most interesting differences between Greek Esther and the “traditional” Hebrew Esther is that Greek Esther includes numerous references to God and to prayer.  The omission of references to God is obvious to ancient Jews just as much as it’s obvious to us, and my guess is that Greek Esther was one attempt to “fix” this “problem”.  That is, I hypothesize that Greek Esther added a bunch of references to God as an attempt to correct what its author/translator viewed as a deficiency of Hebrew Esther.  There are other possible theories but without having more evidence it is difficult to reconstruct the history and relationship between these two documents.

In conclusion, while I expect to be writing at length about the cultural context and themes of the book, I don’t want my readers to forget that Esther is a story about challenges, danger, and triumph over adversity.  Even if it means reading the book twice, I think Esther is a dramatic thriller that should be enjoyed first and then analyzed second.  While I am going to mostly focus on the literary analysis, I would be doing my readers a disservice to suggest that careful analysis is the most important thing we can do with Esther.  It truly is a masterpiece and I sincerely hope that my readers enjoy it.

And with that, let’s move on to the first chapter of Esther!


[1]She is mentioned in the genealogy of Matthew in the New Testament but nowhere else.