Esther Actually: A Jewish Perspective, by Rabbi Rachel

During my year of biblical womanhood, I benefited immensely from the perspective of Jewish women, particularly my friend Ahava, who was the first to introduce me to "eshet chayil"—woman of valor—as a biblical blessing. Ever since then, I have been careful to consult Jewish sources when working through Scripture, and sure enough, l always learn something new! 

In that spirit, today I am pleased to introduce you to Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, who has graciously offered her insights as we work our way through the book of Esther as part of our “Esther Actually” series.  (See  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.) 

Rabbi Rachel has blogged as The Velveteen Rabbi since 2003. She was ordained by ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal in 2011, and today serves a small congregation in western Massachusetts. She is author of 70 faces (Phoenicia Publishing, 2011), a collection of poems written in conversation with the Five Books of Moses.  You can also follow her on Twitter. Enjoy! 

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Like most Jewish kids, I grew up hearing the story of Esther in the court of King Achashverosh each year at Purim. But I didn't appreciate the subtle humor of the story, or the wonders of her character, until I was entering my thirties.

I don't think any Biblical figure can or should be read in only a single way. But I like to read Esther as the hero of her own story -- and also the hero of the story shared by the whole Jewish people. She's an orphan who rises to power in the court of the king. She knows how to live in an assimilated society -- she goes by the name Esther, which has resonances with the Hebrew word nistar, hidden -- and yet she also knows her own true nature. (The megillah which bears her name tells us that she was known as Esther but her real name was Hadassah, which means myrtle.)

And when it's important for her to reveal herself, to show her true identity, and to save her people from extinction, she does so. Indeed, as her uncle Mordechai suggests, perhaps this is precisely why her life's circumstance led her to this moment and this place. Without Esther, the wicked Haman would surely have succeeded in using the power of buffoonish King Achashverosh to destroy the religious minority who chose to bow only to our God and not to Haman. But with Esther in place, righteousness prevails.

The megillah of Esther is a fascinating one. The tale is all court intrigue and farce: a king who parties to excess but who apparently doesn't realize his vizier is pulling all the strings, a harem of countless beauties, a queen (Vashti) who refuses to debase herself by dancing naked for the king and his guests and is banished for her reticence lest the other women in Persia get the idea that they might try being uppity too. No wonder we read it each year during Purim amid a riot of costumes and merriment, noisemakers drowning out the bad guy's name!

And yet the megillah is shot through with threads of something deeper and more meaningful than all of this. God is never mentioned in the megillah, but divine presence permeates the story.  (Indeed, one might even say that God is nistar, hidden, like our heroine Hadassah who is playing at being Esther.) What we call hashgacha pratit, divine providence, is discernible everywhere. And I would argue that it's present most palpably in Esther, our heroine who hides in plain sight until her people need her to be revealed.

Classical midrash -- Jewish exegetical commentary -- explores many facets of Esther. Perhaps she ate only seeds and nuts and fruits while in the harem, unwilling to sully herself with unkosher foods. Perhaps her name Hadassah is a subtle literary clue to her sweetness (myrtle has a sweet fragrance) and her innate desire to do good deeds (that's one of the symbolic associations of the myrtle branch in Jewish tradition). Perhaps she hid from the courtiers of Achashverosh for four years before she was found and brought to the palace for the nation-wide queen contest. Perhaps she observed Shabbat even in the harem of the king, in secret.

I like the interpretation which compares Esther to the moon: sometimes hidden, but her light nevertheless shines in the darkest of nights. When the Jews of Persia faced their darkest of nights, Esther revealed herself like the moon shedding a cloak of cloud. I see her as the ordinary person who, under extraordinary circumstances, rises to the occasion of living out her best self. And when she does that, she becomes God's hands and voice in the world.

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Rabbi Rachel added that her favorite edition of the book of Esther is JT Waldman's  Megillat Esther, a graphic novel of the Book of Esther. His edition contains the complete Hebrew text of the story, as well as English translation, and the words are interwoven with rich and riotous images of Persia once upon a time. (She posted about his edition back in 2006.) 

Esther Actually: What happens in the harem...

This is the fourth post in our series on Esther. See Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. 

"Taken" into the harem...

In Chapter 2 of the book of Esther, we are introduced to a Jew named Mordecai and an orphan girl in his charge named Esther.  (Her Jewish name is Hadassah.) Mordecai and Esther live in Susa during the reign of Xerxes. Their relatives, like thousands of Jews, had been taken captive by an invading army and exiled there in decades past. 

When King Xerxes begins to miss his wife Vashti,  whom he banished for refusing to appear before him at a drunken party, he consults with his advisors who suggest that he start over with a new harem. “Let a search be made for beautiful young virgins for the king,” they say. “Let the king appoint commissioners in every province of his realm to bring all these beautiful young women into the harem at the citadel of Susa. Let them be placed under the care of Hegai, the king’s eunuch, who is in charge of the women; and let beauty treatments be given to them. Then let the young woman who pleases the king be queen instead of Vashti.” 

The king likes this idea, and Esther is among hundreds of young virgins brought into the harem. 

Now, because this process of gathering women into the harem has recently been compared to an audition for “The Bachelor” with Esther’s participation constituting “sexual sin,” it’s important to look closely at what the text does and does not say regarding Esther’s volition in the process. Esther 2:8-9 reports: 

So it came about when the command and decree of the king were heard and many young ladies were gathered to the citadel of Susa into the custody of Hegai, that Esther was taken to the king’s palace into the custody of Hegai, who was in charge of the women. 

Notice the difference between the words used to describe the king’s actions and the words used to describe the women’s actions. 

This “gathering” is not the same as an audition for The Bachelor! There are no audition tapes or casting calls or rose ceremonies or consent forms or arguments over who is there "for the right reasons." (Not that I would know what goes on in "The Bachelor.") There is simply an edict from the most powerful man in the world followed by enforcement.  

This “gathering,” writes Michael Fox “is not a contest. The desirable girls are simply ‘gathered,’ with no regard to whether they proposed themselves for the honor, or even whether they were offered by their fathers. The will of the maidens and their families is not a factor....The king had sent out officials with orders to gather all beautiful virgins. Moreover, the mention of the king’s ‘law’--the Persian word dat is used in this verse, as in 1:19--reminds us of the unalterable law of the Persians and suggests that Esther’s introduction into the harem was an ineluctable fate, which neither Mordecia nor Esther could withstand.” 

Notes Karen Jobes: “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 and swept along by circumstances beyond ones' control." 

As we discussed a couple of weeks ago, if Esther was anything like a typical  teenage girl in this ancient Near Eastern patriarchal culture, she would not have expected to have any say in her marital future to begin with, and so when she is “taken” with the other virgins into the harem, the chances that she would even think to defy her male guardian, or even worse, the Persian Empire, are incredibly slim. We need not require that the text blatantly describe this situation as rape in order to understand that mutual consent was unlikely. 

And so, at the very least, we must look at the text and say, “We don’t know how Esther felt about being gathered into the harem, thought it is unlikely she would have had much of a say.”  That is a responsible reading that neither glorifies nor maligns Esther’s character, but simply accepts the details we have been given in the text without imposing new ones 

Esther's Immorality?

Unfortunately, after two relatively benign sermons on the book of Esther, Pastor Mark Driscoll returned yesterday to a narrative that casts Esther as an immoral woman. In his latest sermon, he chastises her for not “fighting back” when “she could have said no.” He calls her a “hypocrite” and “worldly,” a woman who “got herself into this mess.” 

As frustrating as these statements may be, I must confess that after listening to Driscoll’s sermon series thus far, I have come to believe that this interpretation does not necessarily reflect blatant misogyny as I had (perhaps unfairly) assumed upon first hearing it, but rather reflects a gross misunderstanding of the culture in which the story of Esther took place and was written. If we give Driscoll the benefit of the doubt on this---which, despite his history on issues related to women and sex,I think we should--and if we listen to his sermon, I think we see a pastor trying so desperately to make this text relevant to his congregation that he twists the story to fit modern, Western assumptions regarding women, marriage, and family. (Roy Ciampa’s observations on gender mapping seem to apply here.) He wants so badly to make this a story that includes a conversion experience, a story about God using sinful people to accomplish His purposes, a story about a sexually promiscuous woman who finds Jesus, that he reads too much into the text. 

As a result, he judges Esther as he would judge a free woman in a free society, and he judges Mordecai as he would a free citizen who could protest his government’s policies without getting himself and his adopted daughter killed for it. (And, inexplicably, throughout the sermon, he continuously judges all single men as ignorant, good-for-nothings who have no wisdom to offer the world...apparently forgetting that both Jesus and the Apostle Paul were single men!) 

He also makes quite a few arguments from omission, concluding from the fact that the text doesn’t explicitly report that Esther “went to synagogue” that she must have been a  worldly, lukewarm Jew, forgetting  that Esther is the one who calls for a fast later in the story, reflecting something of a religious background and personal religious conviction. And while he says he wants members of his congregation to debate the text in their Bible studies, he accuses anyone whose interpretation might give Esther the benefit of the doubt as being prideful. 

Put simply: He rejects the story as given and replaces it with a story he wishes it to be, a story that lines up with some of his assumptions regarding salvation, election, gender, sin, and relationships. We are all guilty of doing this from time to time. It is, of course, easier to spot in others than it is to spot in ourselves...so, despite my frustration with his irresponsible interpretation of the text, I’m going to cut Driscoll some slack and assume that, this time, it’s based on misguided attempts to make the text relevant to his congregation rather than misogynistic inclinations. 

As one astute reader (Bryan) observed in a comment  after my first post on the topic, "I suppose if one is "Mary Magdalene'ing" Esther for the sake of dismissing her value as a disciple then I'd agree. I'm not sure I agree Mark is doing that. I think he's just wrapping up the story with a new sexual take -- his favored paradigm it seems -- and trying for something novel, perhaps for its own sake. He's trying, I think, -- and too hard at it -- to teach the Reformed worldview narrative of complete depravity and unmerited election to God's work by Grace through faith. Painting Esther worse than she was makes that worldview sell much better."

Sometimes your readers are right!

Friend of Eunuchs.... 

Now let me be clear: I am not interested in casting Esther as a sinless, goldy heroine who could do no wrong and who should be praised uncritically. (Frankly, how she behaves at the end of the story--ordering a second day of massacres against the enemies of the Jews--is more troubling to me than how she behaves at the beginning of it!) But I am interested in what the text actually says about her. And thus far in the story, it hasn’t said much. Esther appears to be the passive recipient of circumstances beyond her control, perhaps even a victim of them. She is a young girl, “taken” into the harem of a powerful king and “commanded” by her caretaker Mordecai not to reveal her Jewish identity. So far, she has come across as rather powerless. 

But then she enters the harem and befriends the eunuchs. 

According to verse 9, Esther pleases the eunuch Hegai and “gains” or “takes” (nasa’)  kindess (hesed). Michael Fox notes that “this idiom, found only in Esther, holds a suggestion of activeness in ‘gaining’ rather than, as the usual idiom has it, ‘finding’ (masa’) kindness. Gaining kindness is something she is doing, rather than something being done to her. Thus she has some social skills, and not only good looks.” 

The text reports that Esther found such favor with all who encountered her. And in the context of a harem of hundreds of women, it’s hard to believe that this was a result of good looks alone. We cannot know for sure why Esther befriended the eunuchs or why she found favor in the eyes of so many people. Perhaps she was manipulative. Perhaps she had a good sense of humor to go along with those good looks.  I like to think that it was because she was kind...especially to the eunuchs who, like Esther, had once been “taken” and used by the king. Sometimes powerlessness makes people bitter and angry; sometimes it makes them compassionate and kind. (Again, this is a reading that I favor, but it is not one spelled out explicitly in the text.) 

Regardless, this alliance with Megia turns out to be a critical one, for he helps Esther prepare for her night with the king and ensures that she is properly cared for and fed. And, as we will see in future installments of the series, Esther’s favor with the eunuchs will prove critical to her efforts in saving the Jews, as God continues to use the powerless to shame the powerful. 

...More to come!

[Sources: Michael V. Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther;  Karen Jobes, Esther (The NIV Application Commentary)]

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What do you think? Is Esther to blame for her circumstances? How can we stay faithful to what the text actually says and still find elements of this ancient story that are relevant to our lives? 

Esther Actually: Vashti, the Other Queen

This is Part 3 in our series on the book of Esther. See Part 1 and Part 2. 

While just about everyone familiar with Scripture has heard of the beautiful Queen Esther, few know of Vashti, the “other queen,” whose defiance set in motion the events that would allow Esther to rise to power and save the Jewish people. 

The book of Esther opens with a banquet. At the height of his glory and wealth, King Xerxes threw a lavish, multi-day banquet for all the nobles of his court. Feasts were held day and night in the palace garden, where fine blue and white linen hung from marble pillars, and merrymakers lounged on couches made of gold and silver and precious stones. Wine was so abundant that the king allowed each guest to drink without restrictions. Servants were told to give each man as much as he wished, and as the days wore on, the party grew wilder and wilder. 

On the seventh day, when Xerxes was “in high spirits from wine,” he commanded the seven eunuchs who served him to bring Queen Vashti to the garden. He wanted to display her body before all the men of the court, for she was “beautiful to behold.” Early Jewish interpreters suggested that Xerxes wanted Vashti to strip naked of all but her crown; others disagree. But with a room full of drunken men demanding the presence of a beautiful woman, I think we can all agree Xerxes wasn’t calling her in to consult her for a trivia game. 

Well, when the attendants delivered the king’s command, Vashti refused to obey. She wouldn’t come out. 

Her defiance infuriated the king, who consulted his closest advisers on how to respond to his wife’s disobedience. As we will see time and again in the story of Esther, King Xerxes reacts emotionally and then relies on other people to think for him. A confidant named Memukan takes advantage and turns this little domestic dispute into a full-blown national crisis. 

“Queen Vashti has done wrong,” he says, “not only against the king but also against all the nobles and the people of the provinces of King Xerxes. For the queen’s conduct will become known to all the women, and so they will despise their husbands and say, ‘King Xerxes commanded Queen Vashti to be brought before him, but she would not come.’ This very day the Persian and Median women of the nobility who have heard about the queen’s conduct will respond to all the king’s nobles in the same way. There will be no end of disrespect and discord!” (Esther 1:16-18)

The overreaction is downright comical.  As Michael Fox notes, “Memuchan speaks in universals: all princes, all [common] people, all women. In Memuchans’ frantic misinterpretation, Vashti’s act signals a universal crisis, a rebellion against the sexual and social order, a violation of the harmony of every home and marriage. As he sees it, female contempt is always lurking just below the surface, waiting to pop up whenever the opportunity arises. And he is right, but only because insecure men like him make it so, for if a man’s ‘honor’ depends on his ability to dominate his wife, then any failure to enforce obedience is tantamount to male disgrace.” 

Insecure men obsessing over female submission--why does this sound so familiar? 

At Memukan’s suggestion, Xerxes issued a royal decree to be written into the laws of Persia and Media, that Vashti would never again enter the presence of the king and that the king would bestow her royal position on someone else, someone who was “better than she.” The decree, delivered to every province and in every language of the empire proclaimed that “all the women will respect their husbands, from the least to the greatest” and that “every man should be ruler of his own household.” 

Of course, this opens the door for Esther, who will be drafted into the king’s harem so he can choose a “better queen”--presumably one who expects to be silent and submissive, just like he likes. 

We never learn of Vashti’s fate. Many midrashic interpretations suggest she was formally executed. Others propose she was killed by Xerxes in a drunken rage. Still others, unsympathetic to the plight of a pagan queen, contend that Vashti grew a tail! Few suggest she met a happy end. 

But even those who fault Vashti for her stand against her husband and king can’t deny the fact that without Queen Vashti, there would never be a Queen Esther, and that ultimately, it would take the defiance of two queens to save the Jews--Esther by appearing before the king, and Vashti, by refusing to. 

Too often, Christian commentaries on Vashti digress into silly arguments about whether Vashti was right or wrong to defy her husband.  Those who condemn her or who insist on teaching hierarchal gender roles in the home based on a misinterpretation of Peter and Paul’s version of the Greco-Roman household codes would do well to notice that Jewish audiences during Purim typically chuckle through this part of the tale because the men who insist on demanding one-way submission from their wives and on issuing kingdom-wide edicts declaring men the rulers of their homes are intended in the text to come across as rather hapless and pathetic. 

However, given the context and purpose of the book of Esther, I don’t think the opening act is simply intended to make patriarchy look silly, (though it certainly does). The story of Vashti, I believe, is meant to accomplish two things--one is plot-driven, and the other is theme-driven. 

From a literary standpoint, the opening act serves an important purpose: it warns the reader to watch out of Xerxes and his court! These guys have a bad habit of making major, kingdom-wide decisions based on personal offense and whims, and should not be crossed. This adds suspense and drama to the story, for we see right away what sort of odds Esther and Mordecai are up against. 

Writes Karen Jobes: “The author of Esther is revealing the workings of worldly power and mocking its ultimate inability to determine the destiny of God's people. At that time and place, worldly power was held by Persian men. The author chooses to include and highlight an incident involving the interaction between men and women because in his story powerful Persian men are outwitted by a Jewish woman. Esther has to overcome two levels of conflict, both as a woman and a Jew, to come into her own as Queen of Persia. We  modern readers probably cannot fully appreciate how truly remarkable a feat that was." 

But more importantly, the opening act with Xerxes and Vashti introduces a recurring theme throughout the book of Esther, one we can still learn from today--that the Emperor has no clothes; earthly power is an illusion. 

As we discussed last week, the book of Esther is a diaspora story. It is meant to help the scattered Jewish people come to terms with their identity and their faith when they are in exile, when they no longer have an independent homeland or temple. What does it mean to be Jewish--to be the people of Yahweh--when the Jews are being ruled by violent, opulant, and godless pagan kings? Is God still on the throne when the fate of his chosen people seems left to the whims of kings like Xerxes? How are the powerless to respond to power? 

This, I believe, is why we encounter that strange juxtaposition between darkness and comedy in the book of Esther, and why, perhaps, we never read God’s name. Power, the author seems to be saying, is ultimately an illusion. Beneath the golden chairs and packed harems and drunken parties and patriarchal edicts are a bunch of sinful, insecure, and weak people...people whose attempts to puff themselves up only make them look silly. 

In fact, you will notice that those with the most power in the story are the ones who behave with the most weakness. Not once in the story of Esther, for example, does Xerxes actually make a decision on his own. He is coaxed and coddled by his advisors, by his eunuchs, by Hamen, and ultimately by Esther.  Major decisions in Persia are made not after prayer and fasting, but on whims, in response to petty personal sleights, by the of casting lots. It is an empty, foolish power.

This would all be terribly frightening were it not for the quiet, and at times hidden, hand of God, working all things together for good. I suspect that this is why the Jews dress up in costume, feast, celebrate, and laugh in response to a story about their near destruction as a people.

They laugh because they are in on the secret: that they serve a God who uses indentured eunuchs to change the course of history, orphan girls to reverse the decisions of kings, and rebellious pagan queens to put it all in motion.

They laugh because they know earthly power - be it patriarchy or the Persian Empire -  is just a big show. In the end, it is God who uses the weak to humble the powerful. It is God who makes all things new. 

[Sources: Michael V. Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther; Karen Jobes, Esther (The NIV Application Commentary)]

Esther Actually: Purim, Persia, Patriarchy - Setting the Stage

Today we continue our series, Esther Actually, with a look at the cultural, historical, and religious context that produced the Book of Esther. Much could be said about this topic of course, but based on some of my favorite commentaries, I’ve identified three influences that, for the purposes of our discussions here, should be introduced--Purim, Persia, and Patriarchy. 

Purim

It’s a strange yet poignant juxtaposition: children dressed up as princesses and pirates as if for Halloween, parents donning colorful masks, rabbis reading an ancient story to the raucous cheers and boos of the listeners, wine flowing abundantly, sweets passed around...all in honor of a story about the near-destruction of an entire people group, a story about genocide. 

We cannot understand the book of Esther until we understand the Jewish holiday of Purim.  

Purim, Lauren Winner notes, is “like Halloween and Mardi Gras and bunch of other stuff all mixed up together.  It's a holiday in which there's revelry and inversion and people all dress up. They wear masks.  When you go to the synagogue to hear the book of Esther read, you are instructed by the rabbis to shout and scream whenever you hear the name Haman so that his names gets drowned out. You're also instructed to get really drunk on Purim, so drunk, the rabbis say, that you can no longer tell the difference between Haman's name and the king's name.” 

Check out The Maccabets' take on Purim:

Indeed, the story lends itself to such a reading. Many of the characters, particularly those of the Persian court, are so hapless and exaggerated, you can’t help but laugh. Nearly every major plot development unfolds at some kind of banquet. The text includes colorful details and dramatic twists and turns. It’s a story fit for the stage.  And yet the text also includes disturbing details: a young virgin drafted into a harem with hundreds of other women to be used at the perverse discretion of a powerful and impulsive king, a queen deposed for refusing to flaunt her body before a room of drunken men, ethnic tensions and violence, a genocidal plot, an impaling, and an ending that depicts with some detachment the violent revenge of the Jews. 

The story and the holiday have been linked from the start. This is why, to identify the purpose and intent of the book of Esther, it’s best to start not at the beginning of the story, but at the end. After all of the action in the story has finished, after Esther and Mordecai have foiled Haman’s plot to destroy the Jews, in Chapter 9, the author concludes: 

So the Jews agreed to continue the celebration they had begun, doing what Mordecai had written to them. For Haman son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, the enemy of all the Jews, had plotted against the Jews to destroy them and had cast the pur (that is, the lot) for their ruin and destruction. But when the plot came to the king’s attention,he issued written orders that the evil scheme Haman had devised against the Jews should come back onto his own head, and that he and his sons should be impaled on poles. (Therefore these days were called Purim, from the word pur.) Because of everything written in this letter and because of what they had seen and what had happened to them, the Jews took it on themselves to establish the custom that they and their descendants and all who join them should without fail observe these two days every year, in the way prescribed and at the time appointed. These days should be remembered and observed in every generation by every family, and in every province and in every city. And these days of Purim should never fail to be celebrated by the Jews—nor should the memory of these days die out among their descendants. (9:23-28) 

The main purpose of the book of Esther is to explain and establish the Jewish holiday of Purim. It serves, as Adele Berlin puts it, “as the authorizing document for Purim, a holiday that is not mentioned in the Torah.” 

I find the mix of dark and comedic elements in the book of Esther and in the celebration of Purim fascinating, for I think they teach us something important about the nature of power and of evil, something about what it means to relate to forces that seem beyond our control. We will be exploring these themes in the weeks to come with the help of Rabbi Rachel, who after the current Jewish holidays are over (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur), will share with us more about what the book of Esther means to her as a Jewish woman. 

[Sources: Lauren Winner, “Into Esther, Catapult Magazine; Adele Berlin, JPS Commentary on Esther. Check out this excerpt from Berlin’s JPS Commentary on Esther.]

Persia 

The genre of the book of Esther has been debated, but very few scholars would identify this as a strictly historical text, particularly based on our modern, Western understanding of history as a relatively objective recounting of facts. (For a detailed list of the historical discrepancies found in the book of Esther, see  Michael David Coogan's A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament: The Hebrew Bible in Its Context. And for a discussion on how God can speak through multiple biblical genres, see “Can God speak through myth?) 

Nearly every commentary I consulted, including those most lauded among biblical scholars, identifies Esther as a diaspora story, composed by an unknown author in the 4th of 5th century BC. 

So what is a diaspora story? 

The word diaspora comes from a Greek word meaning “scattered” or “dispersion,” and in this context refers to the scattering of the Jewish people during and after the Babylonian exile. In 586 BC, Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Solomon’s temple, tore down the city walls of Jerusalem, and sent a large part of the Jewish population into an exile that would last nearly 50 years.  Psalm 137 captures the pain of the Jewish people during this time: “By the rivers of Babylon---there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” 

The absence of  a temple and a homeland raised some serious questions about what it meant to be the people of God, particularly under the rule of pagan kings. How can Jews survive and possible thrive in the diaspora? Should kosher be kept? What should be done in lieu of sacrifices? Has God abandoned the people of Israel? Have the people of Israel abandoned God?  What does it mean to be Jewish? How are Jews to interact with pagan culture?   The stories of Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther all deal with how individual Jews navigated these tricky waters, and have served as models to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who have remained dispersed  around the world for centuries. 

As Winner puts it, “Esther is also a story about exile, about being an exiled Jew, an exiled person of faith, and what it means to live in a place that is foreign, to live in a place where you are foreign, where you and your kinsman are aliens.  Esther is a book about how to live with your community in a place that is indifferent to you or hostile to you.” 

The story of Esther is set during a time of historical transition. In 540 BC, Cyrus came to the throne of the Persian Empire and defeated the Babylonians. Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild the temple.  Some Jews had begun returning to their homeland while others remained displaced.  It unfolds in the formidable capital of the Persian Empire---Susa--during the reign of King Xerxes.  

(To their credit, the folks at Mars Hill did an amazing job setting the historical stage for the book of Esther  in  the short, animated video shown before Mark Driscoll’s first sermon on the topic.  I recommend checking that out here. )

The might and power of King Xerxes simply cannot be overstated. His empire stretched across the known world and was connected by an efficient, ancient Near Eastern version of the postal service.  Xerxes exercised complete control over the many people, from a variety of ethnicities and cultures, who found themselves swept up in his empire.  

The Greek historian Herodotus, author of “History of the Persian Wars” wrote just 25 years after the reign of Xerxes and provides some insight into his might and cruelty, including the fact that 500 young boys were gathered each year from the kingdom and castrated to serve as eunuchs in the Persian court. (I doubt Mark Driscoll would accuse those boys of sexual sin the way he accuses the girls gathered into Xerxes’ harem of sexaul sin.)

Esther’s body, the bodies of the eunuchs, and the bodies of the women brought into the harem, were the property of the Empire. As Michael Fox notes, “Everyone’s sexuality, and not only women’s, was at the king’s disposal.” To fight back, to insist on one’s own “rights,” would certainly lead to banishment or death, as the story of Vashti shows.  (Interestingly, several of these eunuchs will play important roles in Esther’s story as the powerless end up controlling the powerful.) 

And so Esther, as an orphaned Jewish girl raised by her cousin in Susa, begins as a powerless member of a powerless group, and in more ways that one...

[Sources: Michael V. Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther; Karen Jobes, Esther (The NIV Application Commentary)]

Patriarchy 

While patriarchy is not an overt theme in the book of Esther, it is ever-present in the story, as it is in most of the books of the BIble, written in times and cultures in which patriarchy was the unquestioned norm.  It’s important to understand patriarchy if we are to understand the incredible nature of Esther’s rise to power and all the odds that were working against her as she advocated for the lives of her people. 

In most ancient near Eastern cultures, including Israel, unmarried women were considered the property of their fathers (or the male head-of-house), and under biblical law could either be sold into slavery to pay off debt or married for a bride price (Exodus 21:7, Nehemiah 5:5; Genesis 29:1-10). Marriages were typically arranged by the male members of the family before a girl reached puberty. Girls were married  as teenagers, and rarely had any say in the betrothal process. The fact that Esther was a beautiful virgin, and not yet married, suggests that she was quite young when she was brought into King Xerxes’ harem. 

If Esther was anything like a typical  teenage girl in this culture, she would not have expected to have any say in her marital future at all,  and so when she is “gathered” and “taken” with the other virgins into the harem, the chances that she would even think to defy her male guardian, or even worse, the Persian Empire, are incredibly slim. Of the girls brought into the harem, Michael Fox writes, “What is significant--and most oppressive--is that their will, whatever it might have been, is of no interest to anyone in the story. They are handed around, from home, to harem, to the king’s bed. Their bodies belong to others, so much so that they are not even pictured as being forced.”  

Esther’s feelings about being brought into King Xerxes harem are not mentioned in the text because they are inconsequential. They would have mattered only to her. 

This is where Driscoll’s interpretation of the text, which we discussed last week, gets to be troubling. In his introduction to his sermon series, he describes in irresponsibly certain terms Esther’s entrance into the harem as deliberate “sexual sin,” her situation comparable to a woman who auditions for ‘The Bachelor.’ She is a woman, “without any character”, he says, who “allows men to tend to her needs and make her decisions.” 

Ironically, that last bit sounds similar to the interpretation of some feminist readers who criticize Esther for not defying the patriarchal forces around her the way that Vashti does. 

Of this view, Karen H. Jobes--the very woman Driscoll himself points to as an excellent scholar on the topic!--says that those who condemn Esther for not directly opposing patriarchy are missing the point. “If there is any lesson to be learned from Vashti's experience, “ she writes, “it would seem to be that women who directly oppose the male power structures will simply be banished, with no opportunity for further influence on those structures. Esther, who is accused by some feminists of playing into the hands of men, skillfully uses the power of a male-dominated world to accomplish something still celebrated annually twenty-five hundred years later." (p. 72)

Like so many heroines from Scripture--Tamar, Sarah, Rachel, Abigail, and Ruth--Esther simply works the patriarchal system to her advantage rather than directly oppose it. This is how women stayed alive in those days, and  it’s how many of them followed God’s will. And as Jesus’ colorful genealogy reveals, it’s how women helped bring the savior into the world! 

Now Driscoll has tried to nuance his position a bit after his initial post was criticized, but he has still made a point of noting that the text never says Esther was sexually assaulted. What he fails to understand is that, in a patriarchal society, a woman need not be raped to be oppressed or coerced.  He seems to see the options as either Esther’s full cooperation and culpability (ie, signing up for The Bachelor) or rape. This reveals a painful lack of understanding of what it means for a woman to live in a patriarchal culture in which she is considered property, first of her family and then of the state. 

As Sidnie Ann White Crawrod explains:

"In order for the character of Esther to be fully appreciated as the heroine of the story that bears her name, the book must be accepted in the cultural milieu that produced it. In the world portrayed by the book of Esther, Esther has no choice but to obey the king’s command. Disobedience would mean death for her and for her guardian Mordecai. Once made queen, Esther skillfully manipulates the power structure  of the Persian court in order to attain her goal, the salvation of her people. This goal takes precedent over any personal considerations, including her fear for her own life. In fact, Esther, precisely because she was a woman and therefore basically powerless within Persian society, was the paradigm of the disapora Jew..” (Women’s Bible Commentary, p. 133)

Concludes Jobes: “Esther has to overcome two levels of conflict, both as a woman and a Jew, to come into her own as Queen of Persia. We  modern readers probably cannot fully appreciate how truly remarkable a feat that was." 

[Sources: Karen Jobes, Esther (The NIV Application Commentary); “Esther,” Sidnie Ann White Crawford in Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe; Michael V. Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther]

When we read the book of Esther, then, we must keep these things in mind--Purim, Persia, and Patriarchy. While the first gives us clues about the spirit in which we are to the read the story, the latter two provide insights into why it is such a remarkable one. 

We’ll dive into the text next week with a look at King Xerxes and Queen Vashti!

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So, what have you uncovered in your own study of Esther? What do you think I've got right/wrong? What sources do you recommend? 

Esther Actually: Princess, Whore...or Something More

In Sunday school, they always made Esther out to be the biblical version of a Disney princess—young, pretty, dressed in fine clothes, and blessed, no doubt, with a fine singing voice. Her story was told as a love story, complete with a handsome but aloof Prince Charming, who picked her by means of a beauty pageant. I figured that in addition to her twelve months of beautification, Esther must have performed a talent and answered questions from a glass bowl before winning the heart of a love-struck King Xerxes. 

I never learned in Sunday School that Esther, whose Jewish name was Hadassah, was drafted, along with perhaps thousands of virgin girls from Susa, into King Xerxes harem. Or that the king had banished his first wife, Queen Vashti, for refusing to publicly flaunt her body before his drunken friends. Or that, as the sexual property of the Empire and under the direction of the royal Eunuchs, Esther and the women of the king’s harem each took a turn in the king’s bed to see who would please him best. Or that the women received just one night with the king, after which they were transferred to the eunuchs in charge of the concubines with the instruction not to return to the king’s chamber unless summoned by name, under the penalty of death. Or that Esther was likely a child of twelve or thirteen when all of this happened. Or that the text never mentions her wishes or desires because, in this culture and under these circumstances, they were inconsequential. 

They left those details out of the flannel graphs.

Esther may have been a queen, but she wasn’t the queen of our Western, Disney-influenced imagination. 

Her story takes place in an ancient Near Eastern culture that regarded women as property, a culture in which Jews like Esther were struggling to retain their identity and safety amidst the violence, power, excess, debauchery, and volatility of the Persian Empire. 

Like many of Scripture’s most interesting and influential women, Esther has been subjected to glorification, projections, and distortions through the years, but in all my years of studying Esther, I have never encountered a reimagining of her story as bizarre or as harmful as that being put forth by mega-church pastor Mark Driscoll in his new sermon series at Mars Hill. 

In true Driscoll fashion, he turns Esther’s story into a story about sex: 

“[Esther] grows up in a very lukewarm religious home as an orphan raised by her uncle. Beautiful, she allows men to tend to her needs and make her decisions. Her behavior is sinful and she spends around a year in the spa getting dolled up to lose her virginity with the pagan king like hundreds of other women. She performs so well that he chooses her as his favorite. Today, her story would be, a beautiful young woman living in a major city allows men to cater to her needs, undergoes lots of beauty treatment to look her best, and lands a really rich guy whom she meets on The Bachelor and wows with an amazing night in bed. She’s simply a person without any character until her own neck is on the line, and then we see her rise up to save the life of her people when she is converted to a real faith in God.” 

To compare forced concubinage to an audition for “The Bachelor,” and to ascribe sexual culpability to a girl who in a patriarchal culture had no ownership over her own body and  no control over her own marriage, is as bizarre as it is disturbing. It’s just as ridiculous as turning Esther into a Disney princess, only Driscoll—being older than 10—has no excuse to project this strange reading onto the text. Esther is not a flawless character (few biblical characters are), but to question her basic morality like this without any support from the text or from traditional interpretations of it seems from my perspective to reveal a troubling agenda. 

Is this not how women have been silenced throughout history--by rendering them either helpless princesses or dirty whores? And is this not how victims of patriarchy and male violence are treated around the world—as sexually culpable, as guilty, as “wanting it”?  Will we let our pastors do this to Esther as it has been done to countless women before? 

The bizarre interpretations do not end there. I have written before about how, in Real Marriage, Mark and Grace Driscoll present Xerxes and Esther’s relationship as model for godly submission in a Christian home. Once again, in their attempts to try and bend the stories of an ancient near eastern culture to fit into the dynamics of a modern-day, Western, nuclear family—perhaps to simply make them more applicable to readers— they have dismissed the actual story of Vashti and Esther and replaced it with one of their own making. (In fact, in the actual story, male obsession with wifely submission is treated quite farcically!)  

Now, let me be clear: I am not interested in countering these irresponsible interpretations with equally irresponsible interpretations that render Esther a feminist hero. No, as with the rest of scripture, we have to read this story on its own terms. And, like it or not, this story is not about sex, it’s not about gender roles, and it’s not about marriage (though these themes are present and should certainly be discussed). At the end of the day, this is a story about Jewish identity and heritage. It’s a story about what it means to be Jewish in the context of diaspora.   It’s a story about God’s preservation and providence to a scattered people, God's presence in God's hiddenness. 

(Though it should be noted that at times the story is funny and satirical, with hapless characters who seem more suited for a Shakespearean comedy than the Bible.  In the Jewish community, it is typically read out loud during a feast  - complete with boos and cheers from the kids...which sounds like great fun.)

This may not be a theme that draws big crowds to your church on Sunday morning, but I believe it is a more faithful reading of the text. And if we’re going to be faithful to scripture, we must learn to love it for what it is, not what we want it to be. 

And so, in that spirit, I’d like to commit the next 5-6 Mondays to a series on Esther. We’ll start with the context of the story, then move through its major movements, drawing insights each week from a variety of commentaries from both Jewish and Christian scholars. Since I am not scholar myself, I want this series to be highly interactive, so please feel free to share your own thoughts in the comment section with links to other resources, books, articles, and sermon series. I’ve heard of several other pastors and bloggers who are also planning to work through Esther over the next few weeks—both online and with their congregations—so I’ll be keeping an eye on their work in order to share it with you. 

Unfortunately, this new, distorted perspective on Esther has become too big and too popular to ignore, so the best way to respond to it is with better information. This will not be a reactive series—we’ll have our own outline and go at our own pace— but rather a proactive one, in which we gather together to reason with one another and wrestle with what the text actually says. 

Because we can’t allow a woman like Esther to be crammed into our preferred molds—as a Disney princess, a victim, an easily-dismissed whore, a contestant on “The Bachelor,” or even a feminist. 

Because Esther is so much more than that.  

Like every woman, and like every hero and heroine of Scripture, she is more complicated than we wish her to be. 

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So, what questions have you wrestled with when it comes to the story of Esther? What are your favorite resources and perspectives? What would you like to see happen with this series? 

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