Seeing the invisible God - Part 2

If you were in Jerusalem on the evening of 4 March this year, you could be forgiven for wondering what was going on. You would have seen people making donations to the poor, giving gifts to friends and feasting. You would have found families heading off to synagogue with their children in costumes. And if you’d followed them, you might have been disturbed when they started shouting during the Bible reading!

They would have been reading from the book of Esther. Their shouting would have been at the villain of the book, with the children dressed as the story’s main characters. These things—along with feasting and gift giving—have become part of the tradition of Purim, the commemoration of the events recorded in the book of Esther.

Why is Esther’s celebration named ‘Purim’? Well, the festival gets its name from the Akkadian word pur which means ‘lot’. Now, what do ‘lots’ have to do with the book of Esther? Another good question! To answer it we need to explore the story a little more.

Last time, we learnt (from Esther chapter one), that the Persian King, Xerxes, deposed his disobedient wife Vashti, creating an opening for a new queen. Now, we move on to look at chapters two and three, where we are introduced to the three key players in the drama and find out what ‘lots’ has to do with this story.

Introducing Esther

After Vashti’s departure, King Xerxes embarked on an unsuccessful campaign against the Greeks. This kept him occupied for a while, but it seems that once he returned home he began to miss Vashti. His advisors suggested that he solve that problem by making a search throughout his whole kingdom for a new queen.

The advisors had all the beautiful young virgins from the empire brought to the palace. There, before meeting the king, the girls were given 12 months of beauty treatment.

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?!

Well, if you call taking an adolescent girl away from her family forever and forcing her to sleep with an older man ‘wonderful’ … but I think for these girls, it would have been terrifying.

Yes, the girls lived in luxury at the palace, but they had no freedom. They were young. They were alone. They were sex objects, simply there for the king’s pleasure. Each girl would have one night with the king. After her night, she would live in seclusion with the other concubines, like a widow till the day she died. Unless the king happened to summon her again by name.

This wasn’t so glamorous!

Fathers didn’t volunteer their daughters to go to the king; officials went in search of them and took them, forcibly if necessary. Among the girls taken for Xerxes was Esther.

Esther was a Jew and an orphan. Her Hebrew name was Hadassah, which means ‘myrtle’. But it seems she was known by her Persian name, Esther. The name Esther is derived from the Babylonian fertility goddess Ishtar, from which we get the words estrogen and Easter.

Esther was lovely in ‘form and features’. But she wasn’t just beautiful to look at; there was something special about her. On arriving at the palace, Esther found favour with Hegai (the eunuch in charge of looking after the girls), and when she had her night with the king, she won his favour, too. So much so, that King Xerxes ‘set a royal crown on her head and made her queen instead of Vashti’ (Esther 2:17).

Now, from the time of her arrival at the palace, Esther had never revealed that she was a Jew. Why not? Because her guardian, Mordecai, had told to keep her race a secret. But why?! We don’t know. Perhaps there was anti-Semitic feeling among the Persians. Perhaps being identified as a Jew would have lessened Esther’s chances of becoming queen. But then it is hard to know why a Jew would want to become a queen at all if it meant having to marry a pagan king?

For whatever reason, Esther chose to conceal her racial identity—and she has been harshly criticised for that. Esther stands in direct contrast to Daniel. Both Esther and Daniel were in similar situations, forcibly taken into a foreign palace. But Daniel was quick to identify himself as a Jew, to make it known he would be different and would not conform to pagan ways. Esther, on the other hand, seems to have blended right in. So, are there other things going on here?

Introducing Mordecai

When Esther’s parents died, she was cared for by her relative Mordecai. Some say the book should have been named after Mordecai, since his name is mentioned 58 times and he is key to many of its events.
Attempts have been made to identify Esther’s Mordecai as the Mordecai mentioned in Ezra 2:2 and Nehemiah 7:7, or as an official named Marduka who is documented in cuneiform records from the period. Some scholars propose that Mordecai was a eunuch, as he seems to have had some access to the women’s quarters at the palace. But we don’t know any of these things for certain.

We do know that Mordecai was Esther’s guardian and advisor, and that when she was taken to the palace he found ways to stay close and to keep an eye on her. On one of his visits to the palace, he happened to overhear a conversation between two of the king’s bodyguards who were plotting to assassinate Xerxes. As it happens, around 14 years later Xerxes was assassinated, but this time the right person was in the right place to stop it happening.

Mordecai told Esther what he had overheard and she reported the plot to the king, giving credit to Mordecai. ‘When the report was investigated and found to be true, the two officials were impaled on poles’ (2:22). Nice!
Ancient historians Herodotus and Thucyclides verify that kings at this time recorded memorable events, such as this, in books of annals. And that is exactly what Xerxes did. The events were ‘recorded in the book of the annals in the presence of the king’ (2:23). And there it was left. Not a reward, not even a thank you to Mordecai.

Why not? Good question!

Introducing Haman

Now we meet our villain. His name is Haman, and the author tells us he is an Agagite. That’s significant because an Agagite is a descendant of King Agag, the Amalekite king (see 1 Samuel 15, Deuteronomy 15:17-19). The Amalekites were enemies of the Jews, and we see that longstanding racial tension continue with Mordecai and Haman.

In contrast to Mordecai, who did something good and got no reward, Haman was rewarded by the king for no stated reason. He was promoted to prime minister, which meant people were to kneel and pay honour to him. But Mordecai wouldn’t bow.

People noticed. People were bothered. Royal officials questioned Mordecai day after day, but he still wouldn’t comply. Was it just that he resented Haman being rewarded when he wasn’t? Was it that Haman was an Amalekite and would never bow to one of Israel’s enemies?  Was it that bowing to Haman would have been breaking the first commandment and worshipping another God?

Although the reason for Mordecai’s non-compliance isn’t clear, it is most likely that he considered bowing to be an act of worship. A clue that supports this is that the Septuagint (a translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek dating around 300BC) has an extra verse. In this extra verse we hear a prayer in which Mordecai states that he will not bow down to anyone but God.

When Haman heard Mordecai wouldn’t bow, he wasn’t impressed! His pride was wounded. He flew into a rage. When he found out Mordecai was a Jew, Haman was so angry he looked for a way to destroy all the Jews throughout the whole kingdom. That escalated fast! From one insignificant person not bowing, to ‘let’s wipe out an entire race’. The reaction seems more than a little out of proportion.

Now, here’s where we learn what ‘lots’ have to do with Esther. Being a very superstitious people, the Persians cast lots to determine the proper time to do things. So, with the help of an astrologer or magician, Haman cast a lot (or pur). This determined that the Jewish people would be destroyed in the month of Adar.

Haman then went to the king with his plan. He told Xerxes, ‘There is a certain people dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom who keep themselves separate. Their customs are different ... and they do not obey the king’s laws; it is not in the king’s best interest to tolerate them. If it pleases the king, let a decree be issued to destroy them’ (3:8-9). He sneakily doesn’t mention who these people are. He focuses on the fact that they are different and gets the king on board by depicting them as a national threat.

Xerxes doesn’t need to be told twice. ‘Do with the people as you please’ (3:11), he told Haman, and he gave his signet ring to Haman, giving him all authority.

If you’re following this series, you’ll notice a pattern. Xerxes doesn’t do a lot of thinking for himself. In chapter one, he didn’t know how to deal with the rebellious Queen Vashti, so his nobles told him what to do. In chapter two, it is the king’s personal attendants who propose that the king find a new queen and set out the way this should be done. Here, yet again, Xerxes is prepared to wipe out an entire race without even asking any questions. How foolish!

And so Haman got what he wanted. His plan was set in motion. His plan was written up in a decree. The decree was sent out via couriers on the very efficient Persian postal system. It informed all people throughout the kingdom what was in store for the Jews. This meant that the non-Jews could prepare to help ‘destroy, kill and annihilate all the Jews—young and old, women and children’ (3:14). Haman was very thorough!

As chapter three concludes, we see the decree going out and Haman and Xerxes sitting down for a drink. But the people of Susa are left bewildered, wondering, ‘Did we miss something?’

So many questions are left unanswered from the book of Esther. Most often in biblical narratives, the authors not only tell us what is happening, they tell us why. Often, the authors know the motivation behind the characters actions. But not here. Here we are given no glimpse into the minds of the characters. We simply see what they do. And so we are left wondering ‘why’?

Did you ever wish you could read people’s minds? When people do things that don’t make sense, don’t you wish you could understand ‘why’? What’s really going on for them? But we can’t read minds, so the best we can do is remember that there is always more going on under the surface. As the saying goes: ‘Everyone we meet is fighting a battle we know nothing about. So be kind—always.’

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by Carla Lindsey (c) 'War Cry' magazine, 5 September 2015, pp20-21.
You can read 'War Cry' at your nearest Salvation Army church or centre, or subscribe through Salvationist Resources.

Points to ponder

How do you respond when other Christians don’t do what you think Christians should do?
    
    
How do you respond when you don’t get the credit for something?
    
    
How do you respond when your pride is wounded?
    
    
How easy is it for you to try to understand people when they do hurtful things sometimes?