Who Was Esther?
Esther's story is set in the Persian Empire under King Ahasuerus (commonly identified with Xerxes I), among the Jewish community that remained in Persia after the Babylonian exile rather than returning to Judea when permitted to do so. Esther, a Jewish orphan raised by her cousin Mordecai, is taken into the king's harem and eventually crowned queen – without, the narrative makes clear, having sought the position or revealed her Jewish identity.
The crisis of the book comes when Haman, an official who has been offended by Mordecai's refusal to bow to him, persuades the king to issue a decree for the extermination of all Jews in the empire. Mordecai urges Esther to intervene, despite the danger – approaching the king uninvited could mean death – with the words: “Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” Esther fasts, then acts, and through a sequence of reversals – the king's sleeplessness, a chance reading of court records, a banquet, a gallows built for one man and used for another – Haman's plot is overturned and the Jewish community is saved. The festival of Purim commemorates this deliverance.
Esther is significant for TLA because the book that bears her name is the only book in the Hebrew Bible that never mentions God by name – a fact that has puzzled readers for centuries. And yet the narrative is constructed so that its sequence of “coincidences” reads, cumulatively, as something other than coincidence. The book withholds the explicit theological vocabulary that other biblical narratives supply, while depending, structurally, on exactly the kind of providential action that vocabulary would normally name.
In Their Own Words
“Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”
– Esther 4:14“If I perish, I perish.”
– Esther 4:16“For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place.”
– Esther 4:14Selected Bibliography
- The Book of Esther – Hebrew Bible, the Writings (Ketuvim)
- Origin of the festival of Purim