Original Meaning

XERXES SPARED NO expense to prepare his women for one night in his bed. For twelve months they were lotioned and perfumed. Spices and fragrant oils were a major export of Persia, India, and Arabia, used liberally by the wealthy and powerful throughout the ancient Near Eastern world.

The famous archaeologist W. F. Albright has argued that cube-shaped spice burners excavated at the ancient site of Lachish in Israel were not for burning incense in religious rituals, as originally thought, but were cosmetic burners used by women to perfume their skin and clothing with the scent of oil of roses, oil of cloves, and essence of musk (scents still popular among perfumers today).1 Albright proposes that such cosmetic devices were used by women widely throughout the ancient world for both hygienic and therapeutic value. The fragrant oil would be placed in the cosmetic burner and heated in a fire. The woman would perfume her skin and clothing by crouching naked over the burner with her robe draped over her body like a tent. Albright cites this passage from Esther as a biblical example of this process. Aromatic oils and spices were Persia’s major export, so such a use in the Persian court would be expected.

After twelve months of preparation, the woman was given “anything she wanted” to take with her to the king. The phrase is vague and its meaning uncertain. It may refer to jewelry and clothing, but also to aphrodisiac potions or other such items to enhance pleasure. Some interpreters suggest that each young woman was allowed to keep the jewelry and clothing she wore on that night as a “wedding” gift from the king. In a less kindly light, it could be construed as payment for services rendered. After spending one night in the king’s bed, the woman was returned to the harem of concubines, where she would spend the rest of her life in luxurious but desolate seclusion. Her life had been preempted by the king’s pleasure. She could not leave the harem to marry or return to her family. The woman would not even see the king again, unless he asked for her by name. Children conceived by the king in these unions were raised to serve their father in high positions, but they were not legitimate heirs to the throne.

After her twelve months of beauty treatments, Esther’s turn with the king came. She “was taken” to Xerxes in the tenth month in the seventh year of his reign (December 479/January 478 B.C.), four years after Vashti had been deposed. The passive voice used here suggests not so much that she was unwilling to go to the king, but that in any case it was beyond her control. The text says nothing of how she felt about her situation.

Esther asked for nothing except what Hegai, the keeper of the harem, suggested she take with her. Perhaps she disdained her circumstances and was unwilling to use them for personal gain, or possibly she was simply indifferent to the outcome of the night. Levenson suggests that because Esther knew she had won Hegai’s favor, she wisely trusted in his expert knowledge of the king’s desires rather than in her own instincts. He infers from this that Esther was “wise and forbearing rather than impulsive, prideful, and self-destructively independent.”2 Esther’s deference contrasts with Vashti’s defiance and implies a different outcome.

Given the sensual atmosphere created by the author’s description of the period of preparation and the competition Esther faced, the reader can hardly avoid wondering just how she won Xerxes in just one night with him. Did God give her favor with Xerxes? The text does not explain it that way. However, it is certain that because this young Jewish virgin apparently did whatever it took to please a lascivious pagan king, she won the position of queen, through which she later saved the whole of her nation, the nation from which the Messiah later came.

Bridging Contexts

THE AUTHOR USES sexual innuendo in this passage to weave a complex of events full of ambiguity and tension. Through circumstances beyond her control, Esther finds herself in the sensual luxury of the Persian harem. “What’s a nice Jewish girl like you doing in a place like this, Esther?” She is being lavishly prepared for a sensual night with a Gentile to whom she is not married. Because of her success, the king “set a royal crown on her head and made her queen” (2:17). Carefully, the author avoids the word “marriage,” although it is implied. Jewish Esther marries Gentile Xerxes just around the time when marriage with Gentiles was an issue among the Jews who had returned to Jerusalem and were concerned with reestablishing a right relationship with God. Ezra strongly condemns the Jews who returned to the Promised Land for marrying Gentiles and insists on their divorce (cf. Ezra 9:12; 10:10ff.). Although the author does not tell us what Esther thought of her marriage to Xerxes, she apparently did not protest. Should she have (see comments on 2:1–11)?

Perhaps Esther hated her circumstances with all her heart. Perhaps she felt that life in the harem violated every conviction and moral principle Mordecai had instilled in her. Maybe she wondered how God could have let such a horrible thing happen to her. On the other hand, perhaps Esther loved life in the harem. Perhaps the sensuality of harem life appealed to a part of her nature. Perhaps she was swept off her feet by the attention of the most powerful man in the empire. Maybe she knew that her lifestyle violated the Torah, but didn’t really care. Maybe she thought this was the best thing that ever happened to her. Would such an attitude have pleased God? Was Esther in God’s will or out of it?

Interpreters who insist on taking an exemplary approach to this story must guess the answers to such questions. If we want to make Esther a role model of some sort, then we must be able to pass judgment on both her situation and her behavior in that situation. If we insist on judging Esther, then the rest of the Old Testament provides the only standard. At first blush, it would seem that to conceal her identity Esther must have violated at least the dietary and Sabbath laws. While this would be a reasonable inference, the text does not actually say that she either kept the law or violated it. Interpreters have found ways of exonerating Esther by proposing that she ate only vegetables and that she kept track of when to observe the Sabbath by the daily rotation of the seven maids who attended her. If the text explicitly said that Esther managed to keep the law while concealing her identify, these suggestions might provide a reasonable explanation as to how she did it. But the text’s silence does not allow us to assume she did.

A more egregious violation of the Old Testament standard is her night in the bed of a pagan man to whom she is not married, and her subsequent marriage to this Gentile.3 But even here Esther’s culpability is ambiguous. Some medieval Jewish interpreters believed that Esther’s night with the king was tantamount to forcible rape and that she could not have reasonably resisted. Others believe she should have resisted even if it cost her life. Clearly her situation was not a simple case of fornication and permits no simple judgment.

Esther’s marriage to the Gentile king has been the most troublesome moral problem for Jewish interpreters because it so clearly violates the Torah’s prohibition of intermarriage (e.g., Deut. 7:3). Furthermore, note the comments above about the issue of intermarriage between Jews and foreigners, which Ezra insisted be dissolved by divorce (Ezra 10). How would he have judged this Jewish queen?

Some interpreters exonerate Esther on this point, deeming her marriage to the king beyond her control and therefore not a true marriage. Moreover, after spending the night with him, some interpreters say that marrying him was the only virtuous thing to do (an argument that apparently would have been lost on Ezra). Esther’s marriage to Xerxes was the lesser of two evils, and in spite of the sin involved, led to the greater good for God’s people. This approach comes dangerously close to saying that the end justifies the means.

The only way we can use Esther as a positive example of a virtuous woman today is by assuming, as most interpreters have done through the centuries, that her life in the harem was not a violation of God’s dietary and moral laws. Unfortunately, the text does not commend Esther’s obedience to those laws. She does not rise to her high position by consistent obedience to the law of God, the way, for instance, Joseph did in Egypt when he refused the sexual advances of Potiphar’s wife and spent harsh years in an Egyptian prison as a result.

The author’s silence makes it virtually impossible to use Esther’s behavior as a moral role model. How would you use this episode from Esther’s life to teach virtue to your teenage daughter as she stands on the threshold of womanhood? What message would she get? Make yourself as attractive as possible to powerful men? Use your body to advance God’s kingdom? The ends justifies the means? The exemplary approach fails here because the author does not intend to hold up Esther as a moral example to be followed. Esther may well have been a virtuous woman obedient to God’s law, but even if she was, the author chooses to veil her virtue in a morally ambiguous and complex situation. He does not allow us to come to simple answers when we consider Esther’s life in light of Scripture. The author is skillfully describing a morally ambiguous and complex situation because that is the way real life often is in this fallen world.

Contemporary Significance

IF WE CANNOT use an exemplary approach to understand and apply this episode from Esther’s life, how do we understand its contemporary significance? Perhaps the reader is thinking, “Well, clearly Esther should have done this,” or, “She should not have done that.” Or perhaps because we know that in the end Queen Esther saved her people from destruction, we feel no need to reflect too hard on the moral and spiritual implications of the means to that end.

It is easy to look at other people’s decisions and size them up, thinking that we know clearly what is right from what is wrong, and that if we were in their shoes, we would have both known and done the right thing. We believe God will give us the wisdom to know what to do and the moral strength to do it. It is easy to talk about ethical and moral issues in the abstract, because in any theoretical situation we can define the situation simply enough to make the choices clear.

But life isn’t always that neat and tidy. There comes a day when we find ourselves in a situation where right and wrong are not so clearly defined and every choice we have seems to be a troubling mixture of good and bad. We pray, believing that God indeed will give us wisdom and the strength to do the “right” thing. We search the Bible with open hearts, looking for “God’s will” in a situation that perhaps the Bible does not directly address. While we are doing this, the situation continues to develop and either by deliberate action or by default we have to make decisions, ready or not. And in those times of great struggle, the last thing we want is for others to make simplistic moral judgments about us. Has God failed to provide the guidance and wisdom we need? In life’s most difficult and complex situations, it may sometimes feel that way.

This episode from Esther’s life offers great encouragement and comfort when we find ourselves in situations where every choice is an odd mix of right and wrong. Only God knows the end of our story from its beginning. We are responsible to him for living faithfully in obedience to his word in every situation as we best know how. Even if we make the “wrong” decision, whether through innocent blunder or deliberate disobedience, our God is so gracious and omnipotent that he is able to use that weak link in a chain of events that will perfect his purposes in us and through us. Esther may have looked back on this episode of her life with shame and regret, or she may have looked back on it with a clear conscience, knowing that she acted as wisely as she knew how at the time. In either case, every one of us also has both kinds of episodes in our own lives. Esther’s story shows that we can entrust them to the Lord and move on.