Women in the Bible: Esther

Christlines
3 min readSep 19, 2020
The Swooning of Esther, Antoine Coypel

There are only three books in the Bible that bear the name of a woman — Esther is one of them.

Esther was a queen of Persia, whose coronation occurred under some very curious conditions:

  • She was chosen through a beauty pageant where the victor would be crowned as more than a ‘Miss’ — she would become the next royal Mrs.
  • Her predecessor was dethroned for disobedience
  • Her husband, the king, was unaware of her Jewish identity

Before she was crowned queen, Esther was a simple Jewish girl, living with her cousin, Mordecai, who had adopted her after the death of her parents. Ahasuerus, on the other hand, was a pompous and impetuous king, who gave lavish banquets for the express purpose of displaying his wealth and splendour. During one such banquet, he called for his wife, Queen Vashti, to appear before the court so that the people could admire her beauty — and by extension, his own sovereignty. Imagine his wrath when Vashti refused! The greatly incensed king, egged on by his own courtiers, decided to make an example of Vashti’s disobedience and have someone “better” replace her as queen. After a lengthy “contest” period of a year, Esther was selected by King Ahasuerus to be the new queen.

What the king didn’t know, however, was that Esther was a Jew, part of the diaspora community in Persia. She had been advised by Mordecai to keep this information from him. The conditions of Queen Esther’s coronation would have had little significance, however, if this story didn’t have its share of intrigue.

The story skips ahead to a later time when the king’s new chief advisor, Haman, takes offence at Mordecai’s refusal to kneel before him and persuades the king to enact a decree to kill all the Jews in the kingdom. Their own only hope of salvation is for Esther to reveal her Jewish identity to the king and ask him to reverse the decree. “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”, says Mordecai (Esther 4:14) But according to Persian law, anyone approaching the king inside the inner court, without permission, was punishable by death — even the queen. Esther bravely determines, however, to go to the king. “If I perish, I perish.”, she says.

But Esther doesn’t rely on her own powers of persuasion. She knows the consequences of disobedience to the king and decides to petition someone else before putting forth her supplication — God. She asks Mordecai to get all the Jews in the land to fast for three days, along with her, before she makes her way to the king. Here, an unusual combination of submissiveness and courage enable Esther to invite him to first one, then another banquet, at which she makes her weighty request, which the king ultimately complies to.

Esther’s patience and obedience seem to find favour with God too and in a series of incredibly serendipitous events, Haman suffers a sudden reversal of fortune, being put to death himself and the Jews are saved from a horrible fate.

LESSONS TO LEARN:

The greatest lessons we can learn from Esther are those of obedience and faith.

Esther is consistently portrayed in opposition to her “disobedient” predecessor, Vashti. She was first obedient to Hegai, the eunuch who instructed her during the pageant on how to find favour with the king (leading to her ultimate coronation), then to Mordecai on keeping her Jewish identity a secret, and finally to what she realised to be God’s call to be a saviour for His people. This final act of obedience required an act of disobedience to the king, that could result in her death, but Esther found the courage to do this through her faith — fasting in supplication to God before going to Ahasuerus. In her decision to honour God over her earthly master, the king, Esther teaches us that God too honours us when we choose him.

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