Original Meaning

VASHTI REFUSED TO come to King Xerxes in the third year of his reign, 483 B.C. Esther was made queen in the seventh year of his reign, 479 B.C. (2:16–17). During the intervening years Xerxes was off fighting a disastrous war with Greece. His humiliating defeat depleted the treasuries of the Persian empire and discredited him in the eyes of his subjects. Shortly after his return from Greece, Esther was chosen as his new consort. Herodotus describes the king’s life after his military defeat as one of sensual overindulgence.1 He dallied with the wives of some of his officers, sowing an anger that led to his assassination in his bedroom in 465 B.C.

The gathering of all the beautiful young virgins from throughout the empire seems outrageously unlikely to our modern thinking. Even by Persian standards, this was not the way a queen was normally chosen. According to Herodotus, Xerxes’ father, Darius, took his wives from the noble families of Persia.2 Often they came from the families of the king’s seven closest advisors (1:14). (Perhaps one of Memucan’s ulterior motives in having Vashti banished was the hope that her replacement would be chosen from his family, thereby increasing his influence on the king.) Some have concluded that the royal wives were chosen only from among high-ranking families, so that the story of Esther is a fairy-tale. Plutarch, however, reports that other Persian kings did sometimes marry, contrary to law, women with whom they had fallen passionately in love.3 Surely a king who held absolute power could have married any woman he wanted.

In addition to one or more wives, Persian kings typically had many concubines, women who came as virgins to the king’s bed and then lived in luxurious desolation in his harem. Artaxerxes II is said to have had 360 concubines of surpassing beauty in his harem, who were replenished by gathering virgins from the land.

In 2:1–11 the word of the king went forth, and “many” young girls were brought into the harem of Xerxes’ court. This herding of virgins offends our modern sensibilities, and feminist critics especially see it as a demeaning and sexist affront to women that the biblical author should have denounced. However, Herodotus also reports that five hundred young boys were gathered each year and castrated to serve as eunuchs in the Persian court.4 One might argue that the young women actually got the better deal. The gathering of the virgins, whether consensual or not, is not sexism. It is a brutal act typical of how power was used in the Persian court. Everyone, whether male or female, was at the disposal of the king’s personal whims.

Mordecai is introduced as “a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin,” a descendant of a man named Kish (2:5). These verses suggest that Mordecai was taken into exile with Jehoiachin, king of Judah, in 597 B.C. If so, Mordecai would have been more than one hundred years old at the time he served Xerxes! One way of resolving this problem is to read the relative clause in the Hebrew text as saying that Mordecai’s great-grandfather, Kish, was the one taken into exile with Jehoiachin (though such a reading is not the most natural way of taking the Hebrew).

This reference need not be taken to mean that Mordecai and Jehoiachin were contemporaries, but rather to indicate the solidarity of God’s covenant people. The author’s point in mentioning the exile of the king of Judah is to associate Mordecai with the exile out of the Promised Land and all that it connotes, thereby providing a historical context within which to understand the events that are about to transpire. When the king of Judah went into exile, all of the covenant people of God went into exile, including those who would subsequently be born in Babylon. Such an association between Mordecai and his ancestors is congenial to the theme of divine providence: How is it that we have been positioned where we find ourselves historically and geographically?

Furthermore, the author is associating Mordecai with another Benjamite, King Saul, whose father’s name was Kish (1 Sam. 9:1–2). Perhaps he wishes his readers to understand that Saul’s father was an ancient ancestor of Mordecai’s. This reading takes the phrase “son of” in the way it occurs in other biblical genealogies, where it means “descendent of.” If, however, we interpret the Hebrew to mean that Kish was the one taken into exile, then of course Saul’s father and Mordecai’s ancestor could not be the same person. In any case, the author is introducing Mordecai in a way that identifies him with the Exile and which allows the reader to draw an analogy between Mordecai and Saul that will be amplified later (see comments on 3:1).

Although neither the names of Vashti or Esther are mentioned outside of this book, there is extrabiblical evidence for the existence of Mordecai. A tablet discovered in 1904 at Persepolis, another Persian royal city, contains the name Marduka as a Persian official during the early years of Xerxes’ reign, which corresponds in time to the setting of the Esther story.5 The name Marduka means “man” or “worshiper” of Marduk, the male deity of the Babylonians. Although it may have been too common a name to identify conclusively the Marduka of the Persepolis tablets as the Mordecai in Esther, the correspondence is striking.

Esther is introduced as Mordecai’s “cousin . . . whom he had brought up because she” was an orphan. Nothing is said of her except her beauty. According to the rabbis, she was one of the four most beautiful women in the world, the other three being Sarah, Rahab, and Abigail (Megillah 15a). In Hebrew narrative the physical attributes described when a character is first introduced is of special relevance to his or her role in the story. By describing Esther’s beauty, the author is aligning her with the women already mentioned in the story, beautiful queen Vashti and the beautiful young virgins, thus creating a certain expectation of how Esther will fare in the Persian court.

Esther is also known by her Hebrew name, Hadassah. The name Esther may be the Persian word for star, or it may be a Hebrew transliteration of Ishtar, the name of the Babylonian goddess of love and war. The Targums of Esther suggest that Esther was a nickname given to the queen by the Gentiles of the empire.6 Some interpreters believe that the biblical Esther story was adapted from a Babylonian myth and that the names Mordecai and Esther are theonymic derivations from the god Marduk and the goddess Ishtar, respectively.

Without accepting this theory about the book’s origin, an allusion to love and war does fit well Esther’s role in the story. (1) She is beautiful, and in just one night, she pleases the king more than all the other virgins. He falls deeply in love with her and makes her his queen—a “goddess” of love. (2) It is Esther who asks for a second day for the Jews to make war in Susa and for the bodies of Haman’s sons to be hanged on display—a “goddess” of war (9:13). It is thus easy to see how she may have been given this nickname by her subjects after the Babylonian goddess of love and war, or alternatively, why the author may have assigned this literary nickname to her. This suggests that the name Esther probably is not her historical name. This Jewish heroine is memorialized not by her Hebrew name but by the Babylonian name that so aptly fits her role in the events.

The choice of the presumably Jewish author to memorialize Mordecai and Esther using Babylonian theonyms affords interesting reflection on his intention. Is he subtly condemning those Jews who had become too comfortable in exile while still acknowledging the great role they played in the survival of his race? Ronald Pierce takes this view, understanding the absence of Yahweh in the book “to highlight the secular nature of the people of God in the ancient diaspora.”7 He sees in the events of the story a failure on the part of Esther and Mordecai, who represent the secular direction in which the Jewish people were heading until they were shaken from their lethargy by the threat of genocide. Yet even if the names of Esther and Mordecai are theonymic and allude to their assimilation into Babylonian culture, the outcome of the story suggests to the Babylonian pagans that Marduk and Ishtar are subservient to the purposes of the unnamed God of the Jews. The victory of the Jews in this story would then function as a polemic against the pagan deities.

Esther is the only person in the story with two names. Leland Ryken interprets this as the author’s way of depicting Esther as a young women trying to live in two worlds—the Jewish world in which she was raised and the opulent world of the Persian court into which she was thrust.8 It was not uncommon for Hebrew peoples to have both a Hebrew name and a second name taken from the culture in which they lived. Daniel and his three friends were given Babylonian names when they were taken into exile (Dan. 1:6–7). The great apostle to the Gentiles was known as both Saul and later Paul. Even immigrants into the United States will sometimes take an anglicized form of their given name. The fact of having two names, each derived from a different language and culture, implies a person’s moving between two worlds, with two different cultural contexts. Therefore, Ryken’s view does not necessarily imply that the author was simply making up two names to achieve a literary purpose. Nonetheless, by mentioning both her Hebrew and Babylonian name, the author is highlighting Esther as a woman with two identities, an issue that will be brought into sharp conflict later in the story.

Ryken sees Esther transformed in the story from a passive and compliant young woman who relies on her beauty to get ahead to a powerful leader of the Jews, on whose authority the customs of Purim still stand (9:32). She moves from being a person of “weak character” to one with “heroic moral stature and political skill.” At the beginning of the story, Esther’s identity as a Jewess and her identity as the Persian king’s consort are not integrated. She cannot be both at the same time. At the end of the story, both of her identities have merged through the events of the story, and she is referred to as the Persian Queen Esther, the Jewish daughter of Abihail, writing with full authority to confirm the letter concerning Purim (9:29; cf. 2:15).

This daughter of Abihail is referred to only once by her Hebrew name, Hadassah, at the beginning of the story (2:7). In the only other time she is referred to as “daughter of Abihail,” at the end of the story, the author calls her “Queen Esther” (9:29). Perhaps her transformation from “Hadassah” to “Queen Esther” implies not only the integration of her two identities personally, but the power of Persian royalty being transformed to serve the purposes of the God of the Jews. The personal story of Esther and the national story of God’s people are eloquently intertwined.

Esther “was taken” (2:8) into the harem where the virgins were gathered. Some commentators have understood this to mean that the women, and particularly Esther, were taken against their will. This is probably overinterpreting the passive voice, which may have been used only to express that it was at Xerxes’ initiative, not the women’s, that this occurred. Some may have loathed the situation in which they found themselves, others may have reveled in it. What about Esther? Her thoughts about being “taken” are not revealed. The passive voice is used frequently throughout the story, suggesting that the characters are caught up in events by some unseen force that has ultimate control. Moreover, their own personal opinion about their circumstances seems irrelevant as the events of the story move inexorably to their climax.

The author also uses the passive voice to explain why Mordecai and Esther were living in Susa. The Jews had been “carried” into exile (2:6). Esther had been “taken” into Xerxes’ harem, just as the Jews had been taken into exile. Regardless of how she felt about it or whether she cooperated, Esther was at the mercy of a ruthless pagan king, just as her people were. The use of the passive voice is appropriate in this story, for it expresses life from the perspective of being caught up in and swept along by circumstances beyond one’s control.

Mordecai commands Esther to conceal her “nationality and family background” (2:10), even though it would certainly mean compromising whatever fidelity to the Torah she had. The author does not reveal Mordecai’s motives for this. Perhaps he was concerned that Esther’s chances of success with the king would be diminished were it known she was a Jew, although the author gives no hint that the king would have discriminated against a Jewish woman. It appears that Xerxes’ only criteria were a woman’s performance in his bedroom and her obedience before his court, not her ethnicity or religious convictions.

Mordecai had achieved a position in the Persian court, although perhaps he, too, had not revealed his identify as a Jew until Haman’s demand for homage forced his hand (see comments on 3:1–4). As soon as Mordecai does explicitly identify himself as a Jew, Haman’s immediate reaction is not just against Mordecai, but against all the Jews of the empire. This suggests that Mordecai counseled Esther to conceal her Jewish identity because he had good reason to fear that anti-Semitism was lurking close at hand. The fact that Mordecai checked daily on Esther shows that he was concerned for her welfare and about how she would fare in the harem.

The ambiguity of Esther’s thoughts about her situation raises questions about her observance of God’s law and her practices as a Jew. She was taken into the harem, gained favor with Hegai, the eunuch in charge, and received beauty treatments, special food, and seven servants. Unlike Daniel and his friends, Esther does not protest. Because she could so successfully hide her identity as a Jew, she apparently had adopted Persian dress and customs at least to the extent that she was indistinguishable as a Jewish woman.

Bridging Contexts

LIFE IN THE Persian court. The author has used the first chapter to introduce the reader to Xerxes, showing what life in the court was like for those closest to him. Of the sixteen people mentioned by name in the first chapter (Xerxes, Vashti, the seven eunuchs, and the seven advisors), only Xerxes remains in chapter 2. Vashti is now only a memory.

In chapter 2 the author continues to show what Mordecai and Esther will be up against. He continues to mock the king, whose word is irrevocable law. In chapter 1, Memucan uses the king’s need for glory and honor to manipulate him, and a decree goes out that becomes the law of the land. Now the king’s attendants pander to his desire for women, and once again the machinery of the empire is put in motion. In other words, twice the king, who holds absolute power, has allowed others who have their own agendas to decide what he will decree. The modus operandi of the king is being illustrated by these two events. What becomes the irrevocable law of the Persians and Medes is the will of those closest to the king, who know how to skillfully manipulate his needs.

The author chooses to tell of these two cases where the fate of women is being decided, first for Vashti, then for all the beautiful young virgins of the empire. This reflects the same outwardly expanding pattern of 1:16–22, where the offense to Xerxes is extended universally to all the men of the empire. Vashti had been used sexually by the king and then banished from his presence. All the young virgins will be used by the king, probably only once, and then banished from his presence to spend the rest of their lives secluded in the harem. This makes Esther’s rise to power within the court all the more remarkable.

The author is carefully stacking the odds against the success of Esther and Mordecai. He is showing that in this world the fate of people is decided not by law and justice, but by the personal agendas of those who can manipulate the self-aggrandizing needs of the powerful. It is terrifying to become the target of such impulsive and unstable power. Those who hold the reigns know this and are compelled to tighten their grip lest the beast turn and devour them.

Rooted in Jewish history. By introducing Mordecai as a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, the story is firmly rooted in Jewish history. This fact may seem too obvious to mention, but it is important for rightly understanding the message of the story, especially with its lack of references to God. Esther and Mordecai’s first actions distinguish them significantly from other biblical heroes and heroines, who would rather risk death than compromise their obedience of the Torah. Rather than stand up for their faith in the one, true God, Mordecai instructs Esther to conceal her faith, and she complies. This compliance is viewed by some as a godly example of female submission to male headship. But the author does not commend Esther, and it is certainly questionable that a woman should obey male authority if and when that means violating the Word of the Lord.

Moreover, some interpreters have faulted Mordecai for his failure to protect Esther from being put in such a situation. The fifteenth-century Jewish commentator Abraham Saba writes:

Now when Mordecai heard the king’s herald announcing that whoever had a daughter or a sister should bring her to the king to have intercourse with an uncircumcised heathen, why did he not risk his life to take her to some deserted place to hide until the danger would pass? . . . He should have been killed rather than submit to such an act. . . . Why did Mordecai not keep righteous Esther from idol worship? Why was he not more careful? Where was his righteousness, his piety, and his valor? . . . She [Esther] too should by right have tried to commit suicide before allowing herself to have intercourse with him [Xerxes].9

The biblical author makes no attempt to vindicate Esther and Mordecai by explaining extenuating circumstances or reporting that they had divine counsel to behave as they did.

Motives for compliance. Modern interpreters also question Esther and Mordecai’s compliance. As Ronald Pierce points out, Xerxes seems to be a gracious and benevolent king, who entertains his guests according to the desires of each. Even his angry reaction to Vashti’s defiance was relatively irenic. He sees no reason to believe that Esther would have been killed for identifying herself as a Jewess, nor even for refusing to participate in the new-queen contest. “Instead, one finds here a diaspora Jewess who desires a chance at the throne so greatly that she is willing to betray her heritage at the advice of her cousin without a hint of resistance.”10 Certainly the temptation to compromise Jewish religious and ethical principles would have been an important issue for the Jews of the Diaspora. It is no less a temptation for Christians today, living in a society that is becoming increasingly hostile to biblical principles.

The questionable character and spiritual fidelity of Esther and Mordecai were noticed even by the first translators of the book, who attempted to exonerate them by adding explanation. A translation of the Esther story was made into the Greek language in the second or first century B.C.11 In the Greek version of the story, Esther announces that she in fact had not violated the food laws and that she abhorred “the bed of the uncircumcised.”

Viewing Esther and Mordecai in a positive light, Jon Levenson suggests that their story “can be read as the story of the transformation of the exile into the Diaspora.”12 According to him, the author portrays Esther and Mordecai as representing the Jewish people of the Diaspora collectively, whose hope for the advent of the Messiah or the apocalyptic overthrow of Gentile power and a restoration to the theocratic Promised Land were diminished by the realities in which they found themselves. The transformation “from refugee to prime minister and from orphan to queen recall prophetic visions of restoration after exile (e.g., Isaiah 54) and suggest that Mordecai and Esther, for all their particular character, are also allegorizations of Israel’s national destiny.”13

While the attempts made by interpreters throughout history to exonerate Esther and Mordecai are understandable, they dilute the message of the original Hebrew and its power. The divinely inspired author chose not to reveal Esther’s reaction to being taken into the harem or Mordecai’s motives for commanding Esther to conceal her identity. It is natural to pass judgment on these two, whether positive or negative, but in doing so we may miss an important point. This deliberate silence is part of the message. Regardless of their character, their motives, or their fidelity to God’s law, the decisions Esther and Mordecai make move events in some inscrutable way to fulfill the covenant promises God made to his people long ago.

Contemporary Significance

DELIVERANCE FOR GOD’S covenant people. These verses that identify Mordecai and Esther as Jews are essential for understanding the contemporary significance of the book. The book shows how against all odds, the fate of a marginalized people within a hostile world is reversed. These marginalized people not only survive, they rise to power within that world. There are clearly two sides pitted in conflict in the story, Mordecai and Esther versus Haman. One side will be victorious; the other will be destroyed. The author shows that powerful worldly forces are working against Mordecai and Esther.

However, these people do not represent just any two groups in conflict. The story is not about how, coincidentally, one group happens to win against the other through an extraordinary chain of events. Rather, these verses identify Mordecai and Esther as Jews. Haman is the enemy of the Jews. The story is not about conflict between any two hostile peoples, it is about the hostility of the world against God’s people. Against all odds, in some inscrutable and mysterious way, the events of human history work to fulfill the promises of the covenant the Lord made with his people at Sinai (see the comments on 3:1). While God may be good to all his creatures in general, he is in a special relationship of protection and preservation with his covenant people.

Esther 2:5–7 shows that it was the Jewish nation who, against all odds, were delivered from the enemies who would destroy them. The New Testament teaches that the Christian church has inherited the promises of the covenant because the demands of the covenant were fulfilled by Jesus Christ.14 The story of Esther and Mordecai is, therefore, a part of the Christian’s heritage, even though the church does not commemorate the deliverance by celebrating Purim. The relevance of this story for Christians today goes far beyond the historical necessity that the Jewish people had to be preserved during the Persian period in order for Jesus to have been born from them centuries later. The deliverance of the Jewish people was rooted in the promise of the covenant God had made to them, to which Christians today are heirs.

The story of Esther and Mordecai shows the wonderful chain of events God used to fulfill his covenant promise to his people. Therefore, the book of Esther has theological implications for the church today. God continues to work through providence to fulfill the promises of his covenant with us in Jesus Christ. Through providential circumstances people have the opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel of Jesus. Through providential circumstances Christians are “conformed to the likeness of his Son” (Rom. 8:29), and through providence God is directing all of history toward its close in the return of Christ.

In but not of the world. Within the broad theological sweep of the book of Esther, the circumstance in which Mordecai and Esther find themselves also provides an opportunity for Christians today to reflect on the implications of being in the world but not of it (John 17:14–19). Some interpreters believe this story was written to instruct the Jews living in the Diaspora of the postexilic period how to survive and even thrive in a pagan culture in which anti-Semitism was an omnipresent threat. The old order of living under a theocratic king within the borders of their own land had passed. The Jews of the Diaspora struggled with issues of how to maintain their relationship to the one, true God in a polytheistic, pagan society. Should they maintain their distinctives in clothing, language, and custom, thereby identifying themselves as Jews? If they assimilated the culture in which they were living, would it compromise their faith? The experience of Esther and Mordecai in the Persian court suggest the complexity of such questions.

Even today, Jewish people are divided about how to live in non-Jewish society. There are some sects of Judaism, such as the Hassidic Jews of Brooklyn, New York, who believe that faithfulness to the Torah requires being distinctively separate in dress, manner, and customs from the culture in which they live. Other Jews find it proper to assimilate the culture in which they live, at least to some extent, while still maintaining certain distinctives of their Jewish faith.

The same issues pertain to Christians throughout the world today. The Christian is clearly instructed to be distinct from the world. For instance, Paul writes, “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking” (Eph. 4:17). In Romans 12:2 we read, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

How Christians understand and apply this admonition varies greatly. The Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, have enshrined the nineteenth-century lifestyle as holy, believing that the modern world and its conveniences are an evil to be avoided. Many of them still ride in horse and buggy and live without telephones or electricity. At the other extreme are Christians who eagerly participate in worldly culture without giving a thought to whether it is compatible with a biblical worldview.

The extent to which a Christian adopts the culture and society in which she or he lives is a major issue, not only for the individual, but also for the apologist and theologian. Sincere Christians wishing to obey the Bible often disagree on how to dress, whether to drink alcohol, what music, movies, and other entertainment is appropriate, whether to run for public office, and so forth. Missionaries must think long and hard when taking the gospel to another culture, to decide what are the non-negotiables of the Christian life and what are cultural options. The issue of relating one’s faith to one’s culture is ever-present, yet most Christians live without thinking deeply and seriously about its implications.

Christians living in Western countries today are generally not at risk by identifying themselves as Christians. However, untold numbers of our spiritual brothers and sisters have had to struggle with that very issue, living under communist regimes or in regions controlled by Muslim fundamentalists. Martyrdom has not been confined to the first-century church in Graeco-Roman culture. The issues raised by Esther and Mordecai living in Persia are analogous to the issue of how far to conceal one’s Christian identity when living in a society that is hostile, at least potentially so, to those convictions.

The relationship of Christians in Germany to the Third Reich is one excruciating example from our own century. While the Jews suffered the most under Nazi Germany, it should not be forgotten that many devout Christians also found themselves the targets of the Gestapo, not infrequently for protecting their Jewish neighbors. The charge against them was the same as the charge the Romans brought against the first-century Christians: political treason. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) is perhaps the best-known Christian who resisted on Christian principle the Nazification of the German church and the oppression of the Jewish people. He, along with many other Christians, struggled intensely to know how to express their Christian identity in a society that was increasingly becoming hostile to their most fundamental convictions.15

Of course, each of us must decide how to live without knowing the end of a situation from the beginning. Many Christian pastors swore allegiance to Hitler, not knowing where his leadership would take Germany in the final analysis. Bonhoeffer himself was finally arrested by the Gestapo in April 1943, and he was executed on the charge of treason in April 1945. American Christians may live with the blissful illusion that our constitutional principle of the separation of church and state assures that a similar situation could not develop here. That may or may not be true. Nevertheless, Jesus Christ calls for the transformation of every area of our lives, and consequently, we must relate our Christian faith to the practices, morals, and ideologies of the society and culture in which we find ourselves, whether or not that culture is congenial or hostile to our faith.

Relating faith to culture. Esther and Mordecai were faced with the issue of relating faith in Yahweh to their lives in the Persian culture. All the Jews of the Diaspora had to grapple with that issue. Their theology and previous religious practices had assumed the political-sociological situation of life in their own land under a theocratic king and worship centered on the temple in Jerusalem. After the Exile, that was no longer an option for the majority of Jewish people. Even the remnant who returned to Jerusalem continued to be ruled by Persia, then by the Hellenistic kings, and finally, after a brief but corrupt independence, by Rome. In such a situation, one way to relate faith to culture is to give up on faith, at least in its practical, outward expressions, especially where there is reason to fear a lurking anti-Semitism in the dominant culture.

The complete absence of religious language in the book of Esther at least raises the possibility that Esther and Mordecai had done just that, and possibly for good reason. When Haman does convince Xerxes to annihilate the Jewish nation, it is on the convenient excuse of political disloyalty, a form of treason, “There is a certain people . . . who do not obey the king’s laws; it is not in the king’s best interest to tolerate them” (3:8). However, the Jews of Persia as a whole must have retained enough of their outward, visible distinctives to allow Haman to identify them as a socioreligious group, whose customs were, in his opinion, “different from those of all other people” (3:8).

Esther and Mordecai apparently had chosen to adopt the dress, customs, and practices of their Gentile neighbors, at least to the extent that they could successfully conceal their identity as Jews. (Mordecai did become known to the royal officials at the king’s gate as a Jew, but according to 3:4, it was only because he had told them so.) Esther’s decision to risk her life by finally identifying with the covenant people of God is, therefore, all the more poignant. Before Mordecai’s conflict with Haman and the threat of genocide, had Esther and Mordecai compromised, or even abandoned, faith in Yahweh? Possibly, but not necessarily. The Bible does not tell us.

At what point does the assimilation of culture compromise our Christian faith and witness? Most American Christians today are indistinguishable from their unbelieving neighbors in dress, housing, professional vocations, entertainment choices, and so forth. Does this mean we are compromising our faith? Possibly, but not necessarily. And if a Christian living in a hostile land conceals his or her faith in Christ to avoid the threat of death, is that person being unfaithful to the Lord or simply prudent? These types of decisions are ones over which equally committed Christians can, and often do, disagree. Yet we make such decisions every day because there is no way to avoid making them. We should each strive to live in obedience to our Lord, but it is not always clear what that means in the nitty-gritty details of daily life in the twentieth century. Moreover, regardless of our good intentions, none of us has pure motives all of the time. Even when we know the right decision, our hearts are not always committed to it.

This is where the silence about Esther and Mordecai’s character and spiritual fidelity becomes a powerful encouragement. Regardless of whether they always knew what the right choice was or whether they had the best of motives, God was working through even their imperfect decisions and actions to fulfill his perfect purposes. Other than Jesus, even the godliest people of the Bible were flawed, often confused, and sometimes outright disobedient. We are no different from them. Yet our gracious God omnipotently works his perfect plan through them, through us, and most surprisingly, even through powerful political structures that sometimes operate in evil ways.

The author of Esther knows the end of his story when he begins to tell it. He knows that God did not come down deus ex machina to save his people from the crushing power of the Persian empire. Yet, God’s people were saved. Even though the decision that decreed the destruction of God’s people was made by a pagan king who mindlessly allowed himself to be manipulated by the ulterior motives of others, God did not directly intervene, as he had, for instance, when Pharaoh’s army was drowned in the Red Sea at the Exodus. In fact, in the Esther story, the same abuse of power that led to the threatened destruction of God’s people also led further on to their deliverance! The same events that led to destruction also opened the way for salvation. It has often been said that “God works in mysterious ways.” The author of the book of Esther is beginning to show us just how mysterious those ways can be.