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.