Decoding Esther's Legend: A Story Of Faith And Resilience

Women who have influence and who have brains and make things happen and change things around them, that doesn't fit with the picture that the woman should be subservient. So if you make her therefore evil, then men can say, look what happens when you put a woman in charge. These women were extraordinary figures of their time. Important discussions about issues like women's power, women's sexuality. All these stories about women in the Bible have sex in common. They have to be recast as evil. They are women who change the world around them. She won the throne in a beauty contest, but Esther is one beauty queen who earned her people's respect, even if it took centuries. Sometimes critics have called Esther, the book of Esther, a work that contains a Miss Persia contest. It's like a Donald Trump contest where somebody has to come and be the most beautiful sort of woman. Jews have celebrated Esther's story with the Festival of Purim. Some experts believe the story was actually written to explain the festival. It's traditionally a light-hearted affair, with celebrants dressing up as the characters in the story. And this is a very fun story, but it's a very bawdy story in a way, and there's all sorts of hints of extreme drunkenness, elaborate feasts, seduction. All these hints of things that we don't necessarily think of when we think of biblical stories from Sunday school, but they're all there. I think the character Esther herself has been looked at in a negative light by a lot of scholars, by a number of scholars, who don't expect a heroic biblical woman to be engaged in the arts of seduction. King Xerxes of Persia was throwing a party, a big party. A little or worse for wear, he called his beautiful first wife to come and show off in front of his mates, but Queen Vashti refused. So Vashti becomes a woman that, a woman of strength and courage, even if it costs me my life, I will not do this. And so for many women, she becomes the model of defiance. The ancient readers of this would have found this quite comical in that here is this queen refusing to obey his orders, and later feminist thinkers have seen Queen Vashti as being more of a heroic character because she refuses to bow to the patriarchy. Furious at her disobedience, the king took Vashti's crown and advertised for a new queen, beautiful, virginal, and hopefully more compliant. The king is worried, and the advisors are worried, that if you have a situation where a woman can disobey the king, this is going to mean that women all over the region, all over the empire, are going to be disobeying their husbands. So they're greatly concerned about the possibilities of the social order collapsing here. I think in ancient autocratic societies, as in modern ones, in a way, of course, everyone has choices, but the choices are, realistically speaking, very constrained. I think if you're summoned to be part of the royal harem, you have a choice, but the choice is probably living or dying. The Jewish courtier Mordecai thought his beautiful cousin Esther could win the crown. At his urging, she spent a year getting ready for her audience with the king. Many lovely virgins went before and returned the next morning empty-handed. When it came Esther's turn, the king was smitten. And Esther is not only beautiful in the face, we're told, but she's beautiful in her form. So she has this wonderful body, this wonderful facial appearance. She's perfumed for six months and has other beauty treatments for another six months, so for 12 months she has to become the most pristine, beautiful object, even smelling the olfactory scents of Esther. And so this is what I think he's drawn to. I don't think he sees any depth to Esther, but she can use that beauty as a vehicle of power. And that has nowadays, in modern terms, this is now being called erotic capital. She knows how to play the politics of the court. She knows when to appear, when not to appear, how to play her role. She operates in this context very astutely. Feminist scholars often feel uncomfortable with her and other females who use indirect means to achieve their goals or to achieve a measure of authority or power. They prefer figures like Vashti because Vashti overtly and ostensibly and directly denies a request of the king. Besides being young and female, Esther was also disadvantaged as a foreigner, a young Jewish girl living in exile in Persia around 480 BC. So there are situations where Esther doesn't, you know, she purposely hides the fact that she's Jewish and she's advised to do so and so she hides that fact. A queen like Esther would fit into the social world in a kind of a double way. Because she's part of an oppressed minority, she would be in danger. So that even though she's an elite character, her position would not be guaranteed. She could be vulnerable. By bringing her husband news from cousin Mordecai of a plot against the king's life, Esther solidified her position. And this was where the plot thickened. The king's right-hand man, Haman, rounded up the plotters and killed them. He also required everyone to show loyalty by bowing to him. One man refused, Esther's cousin Mordecai. As a Jew, it's against his religion. And so this starts the whole crisis out where Mordecai won't bow for Haman and this just drives Haman nuts for whatever reasons. He just can't stand the idea that somebody is not bowing down before him. So Haman got the king's permission to execute all Persian Jews. Of course Xerxes didn't realize this meant his beautiful bride. You can read this as a comic story making fun of the Persian empire, making fun of this extremely drunk and ill-tempered king who isn't so concerned with his people but is more interested in feasting and drinking and building a large harem for himself and he leaves the arts of governance to his advisors. Through it all, Esther appeared oblivious, living the good life as the king's favorite. When Mordecai asked Esther to intervene with the king, she was suddenly faced with a momentous choice, risk her own life or abandon her people to certain death. She won the throne through a beauty contest and now Esther's been thrust into politics headfirst, asked to intervene with the king to stop a massacre of Jews. The crisis comes when Mordecai, her uncle, is in trouble and her people are at risk and he asks Esther to step up to the plate and she knows that she could lose her life by doing this. One of the initial acts of bravery that she engages in is that she appears before king Ahasuerus without his permission and the book makes us aware that this is a danger for her because we are told that if you do appear before the king without his permission he can have you executed. Absolute obedience is required so I think that rather totalitarian autocratic context helps to point up by way of contrast Esther's courage for example in going to see the king. And Mordecai gives her a bit of a pep talk saying you have to do this it's important for your people you're in the same boat as all of us right if you don't do this it's going to be bad for for all of us and there will be another deliverer somebody else will rise up and help us and so you really have to do this and so some scholars have taken that as a pivotal moment where Mordecai steps in and shows that he's the real hero but I think of this more as a situation this builds suspense this signals to us that what she's doing is heroic that what she's doing is dangerous and it provides us a story of of her internal thought process. Esther took her time fasting for three days. Yes I think what is very interesting about Esther is that she does have a legitimate fear I think this is natural this is what makes Esther human this is why both male and female readers should come to the book of Esther and and read it she's not a one-dimensional character. Fasting is certainly part of Jewish worship and the fasting that happens in the book of Esther is one of the few overtly religious things in the book the book itself really thinks of God as being very much in the background involved so the fasting is significant but it's very muted it's very it's a very quiet way of implying that these are religious people. Esther actually is thinking very clearly through the consequences of what can happen to her she realizes that like Vashti she can also be executed even for entering this inner court and she wants to weigh the the benefits and the costs of doing this so it's almost as if she's undertaking a cost-benefit analysis is this something to do. On the third day Esther dressed in her finery and went to see the king to invite him and Prime Minister Haman to a special banquet at which she'll be asking a favor. At the beginning of Esther Xerxes wants Vashti to come to a feast to be an object to be gazed at well actually Esther gets the king to come to the feast he becomes the object she becomes the subject so there's a reversal of roles at these feasts and through her taking the role of overseer of this feast then Xerxes mind can be changed so she fulfills actually what Vashti couldn't do. At one point when Haman is favored by the king and invited to Esther's banquet he goes home and tells everybody about his his feats about his honor and how everybody else praises him and Jewish people will know that only a fool praises himself and so there's also that anticipation in the audience that this guy is going to come to a sticky end pretty soon. After the banquet the king was sleepless Esther still hadn't told him what she wanted and reviewing his records the king discovered that he hadn't honored Mordecai for helping save his life Esther prepared another banquet what's she up to obviously time is running out and she then plays with time which I think helps the audience to get more anxious another banquet this one to honor Mordecai the stage was set for Esther to make her move she finally told the king that she and Mordecai are Jews and the mass execution order Haman was about to carry out in the king's name was her own death sentence. I think she succeeds with the king through these feasts and through the reasoning that that she does with him saying did you know introducing this information to him and in a slow and careful way taking her time to negotiate this complex social and power dynamic and so she is able to slowly introduce information in order to accomplish the sand and when he realizes that Haman is there to destroy the people he can take that information that is being shared in a conversational way in a non-threatening social environment and then in that position of power she asks the question and the king is willing to give her what she wants and she asks for her people to be free here's Esther who could merely survive and could merely exist in the world as a beautiful being as an object and yet she's willing to come out of the closet expose her Jewishness expose her unique voice and an act as an agent for the Jewish people after Esther's confession the king stormed from the room he must choose between his wife and his most trusted advisor King Xerxes stormed out of the banquet at which Queen Esther finally revealed her Jewishness she had taken an enormous risk she asks the king for a favor which is to protect her people from destruction and he says the king says well who would want to destroy your people well it's that wicked Haman who's right over there and the king gets upset and has to go out and collect himself out in the garden for a bit and while he's doing that Haman who realizes that this can't possibly be good for him throws himself on Esther's dining couch and begs for mercy when the king re-entered the banquet he saw Haman pleading with Esther for his life if we can imagine Esther on her reclined on her dining couch and Haman having thrown himself upon the couch somehow in close proximity to her perhaps kneeling on the floor and draping himself across her the king comes back in the room and he sees Haman practically on top of his wife so his first reaction is what he's trying to destroy her people but but first of all he's going to try to rape my own wife right here in my own palace so that doesn't signal good things for Haman his act of supplication is misread by the king as an act of belligerence or aggression and it's another one of these comic misunderstandings that occur in the story that that drive the narrative Haman will be hanged on the very gallows built for Esther's cousin Mordecai by the end of the story when Haman's about to be killed he is bowing down at Esther begging for his life and we have a complete reversal from the beginning to the end and this reversal had been engineered by Esther the beauty queen with nerves of steel you might say she is more Machiavellian and from a feminist point of view that shows intellectual strength and is just as equal a form of resistance as a direct confrontation and in fact insisting that a woman be able to directly confront a man is insisting that she use a masculine technique which is confrontation in a sense she becomes the heroine because she's able to take advantage of her social position and get on the inside track with the powers that be to protect her people and so we have all these different elements of reversal that play out and make this a fun story and the readers aware of all this as it's playing out and that's sort of the the fun tension that we have as readers where we see how this is going to play out negatively for Haman and we can we know how he's going to get his comeuppance you know she purposely hides the fact that she's Jewish and she's advised to do so and so she hides that fact she sets up the situation to play out in a way that she wants to play out so she's kind of working behind the scenes maybe perhaps lying although I think deceit is maybe a better way of thinking of it of course it's the appropriate retribution because Haman was planning to kill Mordecai Esther's uncle on a gallows that he had had specially prepared Haman is of course hung on that very gallows just one problem by law even the king could not rescind royal edicts the order to massacre the Jews still stood it's a very strange ending to the story where this king who seems to have the power over everything the power of life and death but he doesn't have power over his own drunkenly issued edicts so he has to issue another edict that will hopefully cancel that out and in some ways that's making fun of the Persian empire's bureaucracy it's also making fun at the the it's making fun in some ways of the the powerlessness of this king and there are hints of that throughout king Xerxes gave the Jews permission to fight back and allowed powerful allies to help them 75,000 people would be killed including prime minister Haman's 10 sons after the holocaust Esther's story of assimilation was seen in a new light the story of Esther and its humor changes dramatically I think after World War II you know when we I think when an ancient person was reading this story and they get to the end of the story where it describes thousands of people being slaughtered right and the potential for murder on a mass level I think this wouldn't have been taken too seriously in ancient times I think this would have been seen as all part of a fun story uh nobody would have taken as seriously this wouldn't have been really possible given the technology of the time but I think after various periods of of real oppression uh the Jews have felt this story takes on more somber tones and I think especially in theology post-holocaust a story about the potential genocide of the Jews has less humor in it than it would have in ancient times when we talk about a post-holocaust audience that means us non-Jews as well as Jewish readers must read that story with horror and danger after the holocaust Esther's assimilation and complicity in her objectification became more readily understandable as survival techniques Esther uses her sexuality in the way that she was meant to do she can use the erotic power she has as a form of cultural capital and instead of using it in a way that's humiliating or derogatory she uses it as a vehicle to communicate truth about her people and to save her people so it's a very important book in terms of modeling what a person like Esther who's a woman she's a minority she's not in a position of power and yet she uses everything she has for the good of her people and in some ways I think this is one of the messages of the book for an audience in the post-exilic period when the Jews are not in power and they live in under foreign domination is that like Esther and her uncle Mordecai you bring to the table what you have you use what you have and in the end you can serve your people well the story of Esther is really an encouragement to other Jews in the diaspora that you can make it you can be two things one you can survive but most importantly you can be true to your own faith you can be true to the god of your ancestors true to your religion even as a Jew in a foreign land and in fact you can kind of win over those who might oppress you by being true to who you are and by being true to your faith this is not someone who's challenging society on every level she doesn't have to go into every aspect of life and overthrow it and turn the world upside down so she is like the everyday woman in modern society nowadays who in her own way can contribute to the good of society who can use her virtue her courage her intelligence to negotiate very complex male-dominated structures in order to assert the truth and to bring the faithful throughout history and to move them throughout history a complex and controversial character Esther grew from beauty queen into her people's savior