Esther's Voice and God's Activity

Until Esther sees the Mordecai and her people in distress, she is exclusively acted upon. Up to this point, Esther has no dialogue and is given no choices. She is constrained by strict boundaries and thrives because she excels at navigating a world created by people more powerful than she is. This is a shrunken world ruled, until now, by wicked people acting in petty ways with the aim to shame and belittle others.

The vulnerable in this story – Vashti, Esther, the virgins, concubines, the Jewish exiles, are not vulnerable because vulnerability is intrinsic to their personhood. They are vulnerable because the wicked have both created and preyed upon their vulnerability. These groups do not occupy positions of shame because they are somehow unworthy, but because the wicked created superficial, arbitrary systems of honor and shame in order to perpetuate oppression,

When Esther begins to speak and act, we begin to see God’s movement. In other words, God’s activity is tied to Esther’s voice. In turn, her initiative is implicitly tied to her faith that God will remember their people. God’s remembrance is embodied in Esther’s courage and initiative because she is the one who names her people back into being and dignity. In the process of telling this salvation story, the author deconstructs the honor system of her cultural context, asking questions and giving the readers ideas about a dignity that supersedes dehumanizing systems.

Queen Esther’s Banquet by Lilian Broca

When Mordecai learns that Haman has plotted for the destruction of the Jewish people, he and his people go into mourning.¹ When Esther sees Mordecai’s distress she inquires as to the cause and is easily convinced that she is the only one who can procure their survival. Mordecai famously posits, “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this?”

However, Esther has not been summoned to the king for a month. If she is to save her people, she cannot wait any longer for the king’s whim to summon her. She will have to enter his throne room.

Access to the king was stringently restricted even for the queen. Approaching the king without a summons is an offense punishable by death. These boundaries were designed to enhance the king’s honor and prevent assassination attempts.² The throne room itself was set up as a sacred-esque space in order to reflect the king’s authority and majesty.³ The doorway is the critical point with the king established on his throne at the opposite side of the room.⁴ For a person to transgress the boundary of the doorway uninvited is to potentially taint his honor and dignity by failing to take the majesty of the king and the throne room seriously.

Esther does not simply dress up to look splendid for the king, but she deliberately dresses in royal robes in order to present herself as the queen submissive to her king.⁵ When she enters the throne room, the king is thrilled to see her, indicating how enamored he is with her. Esther’s entrance could have been received as an affront, in which case her life would have been forfeit, however she enters in such a way that so that her uninvited entrance does not threaten his honor and dignity.

For two consecutive nights, Esther hosts a banquet for Ahasuerus and Haman. It is possible she lost her nerve the first night and asked for a second. It is possible she wanted ample time to soothe the king’s ego before her petition to save her people. It is also possible she took the king to her bed to leave him all the more inclined to hear her out when she chose her moment. Either way, both Ahasuerus and Haman were delighted by Esther’s attentions.

When Esther is ready, she reveal’s Haman’s plot to the Ahasuerus. For a second time, Ether risks insulting the king’s sense of honor because she is revealing that this clueless man was easily manipulated into essentially sentencing his own queen to death. Esther is also subtly asking the king to reverse or alter a law he signed into being.

Esther is wise as she presents well-prepared rhetoric that is not only unthreatening to the king’s sense of honor but seeks to enhance it. You can read her impressive speech in chapter seven of her book, but Esther employs several strategies at once to appeal of her people’s survival. Firstly, Esther speaks deferentially to him as one who has “found favor” and begins by petitioning for her own life before requesting the lives of her people. She ties her survival to her people’s, requiring Ahasuerus to save all or none.

Secondly, Esther also claims that if she and her people had only been sold into slavery it would not have been necessary for her to bring this matter before the king This statement is remarkable because she is indicating that she would allow herself to be sold into slavery by Ahasuerus’ own edict, but the unspoken reality (that Esther allows Ahasuerus to fill in for himself) is that he has condemned her to death. This would reflect incredible shame on the king and thus requires that he respond to her request.⁶

Thirdly, Esther poses her statements in such a way that Ahasuerus need not take any blame especially since it would seem that he does not recognize that the edict she is speaking of is the deal that he and Haman made. Esther places the blame entirely on Haman so that Ahasuerus is spared any responsibility for commanding his own queen be executed.

It is the Persian honor/shame culture that ultimately paves the way for Esther to address the matter before the king and require he respond. It would be humiliating for the king to have condemned his own queen to destruction along with all of her people. The shame that Haman’s deception has heaped upon Ahasuerus sends the king into a rage reminiscent of the opening scene in the book when Vashti defied Ahasuerus

In a fortunate turn of events, Haman falls on the couch where Esther is reclining and the king interprets his posture before Esther as assaulting her.⁷ If Haman, or anyone, were to violate the queen it would indicate a treasonous intent to usurp the king.⁸ In this way, Ahasuerus is able to make a charge against Haman that will rid himself of the dishonorable implications of the edict.⁹ In the end, Haman is hung on the gallows he constructed for Mordecai, the Jewish people are allowed to defend themselves, thus bestowing honor on the group of exiles. In the end, God’s people feast, celebrate, and drown out the names of the evil. If God cannot be defeated nor can they.

Although honor becomes a valuable tool for Esther, Ahasuerus, Haman, and the rest of the Persian court’s obsession with maintaining honor is hilariously ironic throughout the book of Esther. The book opens with superficial pageantry and pomp, but the reality is that the king is returning defeated and disgraced and the ridiculously indulgent excesses are a mere façade.

The so-called dignified king unwittingly relies on servants like Hegai to raise up his appropriate queen while Ahasuerus engages in licentious gratification. He neglects to honor, or even remember, Mordecai’s heroism when Mordecai foils an assassination plot but appoints a manipulative second-in-command who intends to commit genocide.¹⁰ He recklessly signs off on Haman’s plan without realizing he has endangered his own honor because he is ignorant about Esther’s identity.

In contrast to the pomp and circumstance of the Persian court Esther and Mordecai were each a part of a people taken into exile – the epitome of shame in the Persian nation. In opposition to the foolish, superficial displays of honor by the Persians, Esther and Mordecai are depicted as possessing true honor. Esther acted boldly to rescue her people from certain death and Mordecai became great in the eyes of Persia and the Jewish nation until ultimately becoming second-in-command to Ahasuerus. Esther and Mordecai would go on to use their authority and status to advocate for their people, each of them operating with “full authority” – a position of honor and authority beyond what even Haman could hope to achieve.

God is present in this story in the way that he is named and remembered as opposed to his voice and actions driving the narrative forward in the way we see God acting in most other biblical stories. Esther commands three days of fasting and prayer then we conclude with Esther establishing the Feast of Purim. God is present, but only in the faithful lives and practices of his people.

I do not tell this story to say that the vulnerable and oppressed should operate within the situation they have in order to reach some level of authority that usurps their former position. This is not Esther’s message. Although this story certainly indicts, indeed mocks, the powerful and so-called honorable and the oppression they perpetuate, we are not to take away the message “work hard within the corrupt world system you are in to reach a position of honor and power.”

I think that this is a story that wonders what does the faithful life look like when God is not speaking and does not seem to be remembering. This is a story that imagines how God is present in the embodied faith of his people. I think that any believer can reach a place of feeling abandoned and ignored until the only witness of God in your life is the prayers of God’s people.

If God is present in the prayers and practices of his Body, are they ever truly absent?

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1. While I am focusing on Queen Esther, the honor/shame culture also reveals a great deal about Haman and Mordecai’s exchanges. Haman is the only person in the kingdom with the authority to appear freely before the king. He is ultimately enraged because Mordecai refused to honor Haman and pay appropriate homage to his supreme authority. Haman sought revenge by attempting to wipe out all of the Jewish people. We must also consider that even being an exiled people would have been considered extraordinarily shameful in the ANE and indicative of divine punishment. Their honor was restored when they were given the right to defend themselves and achieved victory (Phillips, 571-572).

2. Phillips, 633.

3. This procession from least holy to most is not only commonly seen in ancient throne rooms, but ancient temples as well. For example, the Jerusalem temple proceeds from common to holy, with access being more and more restricted the farther in a worshipper proceeded. The innermost room is known as the Holy of Holies, which housed the Ark of the Covenant. Only the high priest allowed access once a year and only after meticulous preparation.

4. Phillips, 637.

5. Ibid.

6. Phillips, 649.

7. Although it is not necessarily clear whether the enraged king chose to intentionally misinterpret Haman’s actions or if he really did assume Haman intended to harm Esther.

8. See II Samuel 16:21-22; I Kings. 2:13-22 for Biblical examples of this kind of treachery.

9. Phillips, 651.

10. Phillips, 572.