The Story-Telling of Esther 

                                        Being a godless tale of booze, betrayal and butchery - 

                                        or courage in the presence of God’s absence -

                                        or a story to make us laugh as we survive in an ambiguous world?

INTRODUCTION

What are some of the particular delights of childhood? For me it was the telling of stories. This was either by a member of my extended family or by hearing them on the radio, or, very excitingly on TV, when I visited my grandmother who had a one-channel black and white set - what luxury! In the afternoons there was a children’s programme which began with the words, ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin...’

One of the characteristics of childhood stories is that the goodies always win and the baddies always lose and are punished - or eaten - or come to a shocking end - whilst the goodies ‘live happily ever after’.

ARE YOU SITTING COMFORTABLY? 

In the Hebrew scriptures there is an intriguing book called Esther. It is unique amongst the books of the bible in that gives insight into the lives of the Jewish Diaspora settled in Persia. These are the ones who did not return to Jerusalem after the Exile to rebuild the ruined city and temple. It is a multi-layered story of hope and survival. In brief this is how it goes:   

Act 1: scene 1 

A Persian king named Ahasuerus is throwing one of his flamboyant feasts for the rich and famous - actually it was more like a drunken orgy. It lasted for six months at the end of which he then threw another seven-day party for all the plebs. In a state of drunken stupor - and to show how manly and powerful he was he then commanded that his beautiful wife, Queen Vashti, come and parade before him and his subjects. (Some Rabbinic commentaries say he wanted her to appear naked.) The queen refuses. (Not a good career move, Vashti.) The king is enraged and seeks advice as to what he should do. A sage called Memucan gives this advice: the queen must be deposed and a substitute found - otherwise the authority of the king would be undermined. As the scripture says:

"This advice pleased the king and the officials, and the king did as Memucan proposed; he sent letters to all the royal provinces, to every province in its own script and to every people in its own language, declaring that every man should be master in his own house." [1: 21-22] 

Act 1: scene 2 

The search was now on for ‘Persia’s Next Top Queen’ - a bit like ‘America’s Next Top Model’. Nubile virgins were sought throughout the king’s empire and brought to the capital for a year’s beauty treatment before spending a night with the king. Amongst those aspiring to royal status was a stunningly beautiful young Jewish orphan called Hadassah, otherwise known as Esther. She had been befriended by her cousin Mordecai and on his advice she did not let it be known that she was a Jew.

Guess what? She won the beauty contest and became Queen Esther!

Act 1: scene 3 

Because of his way of ruling, the king naturally invited animosity. A plot to assassinate him was discovered by Mordecai who in turn told his cousin Esther who then told the king. The men were hunted out and hanged. [Good move Esther] 

Act 2: scene 1 

A baddie enters the picture, his name is Haman. (Not Harman!) He has become the king’s confidante and invested with enormous powers. People are meant to bow before him - and all do - except Mordecai. Haman is livid. He finds out that Mordecai is a Jew, and so plots to eliminate him and all the other Jews - as the scripture says: 

"Then Haman said to King Ahasuerus, ‘There is a certain people scattered and separated among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom; their laws are different from those of every other people, and they do not keep the king’s laws, so that it is not appropriate for the king to tolerate them. If it pleases the king, let a decree be issued for their destruction, and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver into the hands of those who have charge of the king’s business, so that they may put it into the king’s treasuries.’ So the king took his signet ring from his hand and gave it to Haman son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the enemy of the Jews. The king said to Haman, ‘The money is given to you, and the people as well, to do with them as it seems good to you.’ "[4:13-14] 

Act 2: scene 2 

The Jews throughout the empire have been given more than six months’ warning that they are going to be slaughtered but there is no time to lose. Mordecai dresses in sackcloth and ashes (signs of mourning) and gains the attention of his cousin, Queen Esther. Through a messenger he tells her to go to the king and let their plight be made known. This is not as easy as it sounds. One only went into the king’s presence when one was called, and, despite her desirability and beauty, the king hadn’t requested Esther’s company for a month. She was rather anxious about presenting herself to him but this is the message Mordecai sent to her: 

"Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this." [4: 13f.] 

Act 2: scene 3 

Queen Esther agrees to help and asks them to pray for her and also to fast (incidently this is the only time prayer is mentioned in the whole book). At the end of three days she makes her way into the king’s heart - via his stomach. A feast is prepared and the king and Haman are invited. Queen Esther is very wise and doesn’t pour out her heart at this point, instead she invites them back the following day in order to make her request. 

Act 3: scene 1

Haman is elated at the honour bestowed on him - a dinner party with the King and Queen to which he is the only invited guest and a repeat performance tomorrow! His ego is immediately deflated though when on exiting the king’s gates he encounters Mordecai who neither rises nor trembles before him. In a sullen rage he returns home: 

"Then he sent and called for his friends and his wife Zeresh, and Haman recounted to them the splendour of his riches, the number of his sons, all the promotions with which the king had honoured him, and how he had advanced him above the officials and the ministers of the king. Haman added, ‘Even Queen Esther let no one but myself come with the king to the banquet that she prepared. Tomorrow also I am invited by her, together with the king. Yet all this does me no good so long as I see the Jew Mordecai sitting at the king’s gate.’ Then his wife Zeresh and all his friends said to him, ‘Let a gallows fifty cubits high be made, and in the morning tell the king to have Mordecai hanged on it; then go with the king to the banquet in good spirits.’ This advice pleased Haman, and he had the gallows made." [5: 10-14] 

Fifty cubits high is 75 feet - how high is this church? They were some gallows! 

Act 3: scene 2 

That night the king could not sleep. There was no TV channel to tune into so he requested that the book of records be brought and read to him. Fascinating reading. He then discovered that Mordecai’s uncovering of the plot to kill him had not been rewarded. The situation must be remedied; Mordecai is to be honoured. Now it just so happened that Haman had entered the king’s court: 

"The king said, ‘Let him come in.’ So Haman came in, and the king said to him, ‘What shall be done for the man whom the king wishes to honour?’ Haman said to himself, ‘Whom would the king wish to honour more than me?’ So Haman said to the king, ‘For the man whom the king wishes to honour, let royal robes be brought, which the king has worn, and a horse that the king has ridden, with a royal crown on its head. Let the robes and the horse be handed over to one of the king’s most noble officials; let him robe the man whom the king wishes to honour, and let him conduct the man on horseback through the open square of the city, proclaiming before him: “Thus shall it be done for the man whom the king wishes to honour.” ’ Then the king said to Haman, ‘Quickly, take the robes and the horse, as you have said, and do so to the Jew Mordecai who sits at the king’s gate. Leave out nothing that you have mentioned.’ "[6: 5-10]

Act 3: scene 3 

So Mordecai is paraded through the streets in great honour. Meanwhile, shattered in spirit, Haman goes home. 

"When Haman told his wife Zeresh and all his friends everything that had happened to him, his advisers and his wife Zeresh said to him, ‘If Mordecai, before whom your downfall has begun, is of the Jewish people, you will not prevail against him, but will surely fall before him.’" [6:13] 

Act 4: scene 1 

You can guess how the story is going to end can’t you? Yes, the next day at her banquet Esther ‘outs’ herself as a Jew and Haman is confronted with his plot to exterminate her people. He is hung on his own gallows.

Act 4: scene 2 

But the decree to kill the Jews is still law and has been published far and wide, throughout the whole empire from Ethiopia to India. For some obscure reason it cannot be repealed. Instead a second law is invoked allowing the Jews to defend themselves. These letters are sent throughout the empire. 

"By these letters the king allowed the Jews who were in every city to assemble and defend their lives, to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, with their children and women, and to plunder their goods "[8:11] 

And so by royal decree 75,000 are slaughtered on one hand - and on the other: 

"For the Jews there was light and gladness, joy and honour. In every province and in every city, wherever the king’s command and his edict came, there was gladness and joy among the Jews, a festival and a holiday. Furthermore, many of the peoples of the country professed to be Jews, because the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them." [8:16-17] 

Act 4: scene 3 

The curtain comes down on the final scene as Mordecai is honoured as a law-giver.

" Mordecai recorded these things, and sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus, both near and far, enjoining them that they should keep the fourteenth day of the month Adar and also the fifteenth day of the same month, year by year, as the days on which the Jews gained relief from their enemies, and as the month that had been turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday; that they should make them days of feasting and gladness, days for sending gifts of food to one another and presents to the poor. So the Jews adopted as a custom what they had begun to do, as Mordecai had written to them. Therefore these days are called Purim, from the word Pur. Thus because of all that was written in this letter, and of what they had faced in this matter, and of what had happened to them, the Jews established and accepted as a custom for themselves and their descendants and all who joined them, that without fail they would continue to observe these two days every year, as it was written and at the time appointed. These days should be remembered and kept throughout every generation, in every family, province, and city; and these days of Purim should never fall into disuse among the Jews, nor should the commemoration of these days cease among their descendants. "[9: 20-23; 26-28] 

And so it continues to this very day.

SO IS THERE A PROBLEM? 

The Book of Esther had great difficulty in being accepted as part of both the Jewish and Christian traditions because it fails to mention religious obligations: the Law, the covenants, sacrifices, Jerusalem or the Temple. Neither Mordecai nor Esther acknowledge Jewish law or lifestyle. Esther marries a non-Jew and eats non-kosher food. The Gentile King of Persia is mentioned 190 times in 167 verses. 

But most telling of all, the name of God is never mentioned - not once. ‘God does not intervene on behalf of the Jewish people. God speaks to no one, and no one speaks to God. God is literally absent from the story’. [Timothy Beal in The Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible]

Some rabbinic traditions say that this absence is a sign of God’s judgment on the Jews for their disobedience. Another author states, ‘some find the hiddenness of God in Esther to be, paradoxically, a clear and undeniable reference to God’s veiled presence in this story world. That is, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, the lack of any explicit mention of God is taken to be a clear affirmation that God is at work between the lines throughout the story. The silence cries out divine presence.’ [Beal] 

The Book of Esther is a story of theological ambiguity. It is meant to be so. It doesn’t offer easy answers to difficult questions instead it encourages us to stay with the questions. ‘Spiritual formation is not about finding security behind an arsenal of answers. It is about embracing a world infused with mystery and ambiguity, a world in which living by faith is anything but safe and secure’. [Beal]

At the same time its main theme is ironic reversal. It uses humour and exaggeration to bring its points home. People are meant to laugh out loud during its reading: A feast six months long! Beauty treatment lasting a year! Gallows 75 feet high! 

The Feast of Purim was not instituted by Moses. It is the most raucous of all Jewish feast days. It is a cross between the Mardi Gras carnival and Guy Fawkes’ Day. It is subversive and noisy. People come in costume and eating and drinking to excess are actually encouraged. However, Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin tells parents not to introduce their children to the synagogue on the day this scroll is read lest they are given ‘a distorted impression of a synagogue as being more of a circus or “fun place” than a “holy place” for worship’. [p. 261]

CONCLUSION 

What is the message of Esther? Is it a godless tale of booze, betrayal and butchery, or courage in the presence of God’s absence, or a story to make us laugh as we survive in an ambiguous world? It is a story which raises difficult questions and condones riotous behaviour - but most importantly it continues to ask us the question, ‘where is God to be found?’ And as always the answers surprise us.

Books I found helpful: 

Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin, To be a Jew: a guide to Jewish observance in contemporary life. (HarperCollins, 1991) 

The Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible and The New Interpreter’s Study Bible.