Studying the Book of Esther

The Captive Conqueror   A Bible Study for the Book of Esther  This study is designed to lead participants through a close reading of the Book of Esther, 10 verses at a time. For every 10 verses of the book, there is a brief devotional thought, which explains the text and suggests some ways that Christians today can relate to it. After the devotional, there are some open-ended discussion questions.   My suggestion is that participants in your Bible Study Group read the 10 verses listed at the start of each section, then read the devotional thought included. After this, the leader can guide the group through the discussion questions which follow. Your group can complete as many of the studies in one meeting as time allows. There are 19 studies in all.

I love the opening verses of Esther, with its description of the lavish, luxurious and opulent spectacle that was the court of the Persian Emperor Ahasuerus. In ten short verses we read about an 180 day-long festival, which culminated in a 7-day long feast, where each official of the palace (from the least to the greatest) ate and drank according to his desire (v.8). Verses 6-7 paint about as vivid a picture of decadence as you can read anywhere in the Old Testament. With its "tapestries of white and purple and silver, marble columns, couches of gold, a pavement of porphyry, marble and precious stones," the courtyard of King Ahaseurus is as elegant and extravagant a setting as the ancient world could imagine. Reading the Bible in short little bites like this forces us to slow down and ponder. Esther and her Jewish kin haven't shown up on the scene yet, so all we know at this point is this: whatever else this book is about, it's going to deal with the challenge of bein...

King Ahasuerus orders the beautiful Queen Vashti into his presence, with the express purpose of showing her off to the nobles, as though she was just one more "thing" in the long list of treasures we read about in verses 1-10. Vashti refuses, presumably on her dignity as a human being, and the King gets furious. And here's where it gets especially interesting, because when he asks his counselors what to do about it, they start waving red flags all over the place: if Vashti gets away with this, they warn, all the women in the empire will think its okay to buck the system  and stand up for themselves, too. So they advise Ahasuerus to take Vashti's "royal position" away and give it to another, more worthy than her (read: more docile). And this is the point where the text grabbed me, because in the Hebrew it says, "give her 'rule' to a 'neighbour' better than her"; and the wording here is almost exactly the same as what Samuel said to S...

The Sunday School readings of the Book of Esther that I grew up with tend to sanitize Esther's story, talking about the search for Queen Vashti's replacement in terms of a "beauty contest" (so, for instance, in the Veggie Tales telling of this story, all Esther has to do is to compete in a talent show). But when you read it in short, 10-verse chunks like this, the very dark, very traumatic thing that's really happening here has time to hit you in the gut. "Let the king appoint commissioners to bring all the young virgins from every province of his realm into the harem in Susa" suggest his advisers, "And let the girl who 'pleases' the king best become the next queen." You don't have to read between the lines too much to get what's really going on here, and it ain't no fairy tale. For just a second this morning I tried to imagine some ruthless government "commissioner" coming to my door, and hauling off a daughter...

As I was reading about all the "beauty treatments" the candidates for Queen Vashti's replacement were subjected to--a six month oil of myrrh treatment followed by a six month perfume and cosmetics treatment--my mind kept thinking about the way our own culture objectifies and consumes human beings (and in particular, women) like that. Subjecting a helpless girl to a year-long beautification ordeal on the off chance that she might please the tastes of a decadent (seemingly insatiable) Emperor, who is himself the embodiment of a decadent (seemingly insatiable) culture, doesn't seem that  different from our own culture's obsession with female beauty and body-image. Think of the "use" of the female body in advertising media; think of the multi-billion-dollar-a-year cosmetics industry (or the thinness industry, or the plastic surgery industry); think of Hollywood's sexist cult of celebrity; think of the increasing pornographication of our culture and the ...

After a somewhat heavy reflection in our last study, today I’m thinking about random acts of kindness. In an almost throw-away line, The Book of Esther mentions how Mordecai found out about a conspiracy to kill King Ahasuerus and warned him through Queen Esther, an event which gets recorded in King's Record Book. It only gets this passing, three verse nod, but if we've read Esther before, we already know that this small, seemingly insignificant act of righteousness is going to yield a harvest of salvation down the road. Like a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon, it will create a typhoon of upset for the enemies of God's people, before the story's done. It's doubly remarkable, too, because Ahasuerus just finished abducting Mordecai's cousin and adopted daughter, forcing her into his harem. If anyone had reason to wish the King dead, it was Mordecai, and yet he acts to save him. It got me thinking about the random times I've "done the right t...

The plot is beginning to thicken for Esther and her kin, as Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman in the gate, and Haman, in turn, hatches a genocidal plot to destroy the Jewish people. On the one hand, this sounds a whole lot like Daniel, another book dealing with the challenges of being faithful to God in the midst of exile (remember Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, thrown into the furnace because they wouldn't bow to the king's image?). On the other hand, it's really telling, the justification Haman gives King Ahasuerus for destroying them: their customs and way of life are different from all the other people (3:8). This, ultimately, is the challenge for God's people: to remain "different" from the way the World does business, in the face of immense pressure to conform. They asked Mordecai why he wouldn't just bow to Haman and be done with it (3:3), and no answer is given; but I think 3:8 is the answer: he's determined to stay true to the Jewish way ...

From what I understand, in the Jewish tradition whenever the Book of Esther is read (once a year at the Feast of Purim), it's customary to boo, hiss and/or heckle whenever Haman's name get's mentioned. There's something very visceral in this that seems appropriate. The genocidal plan, as it’s described in verses 3:14-15, is about as absolute as it can get: an order sent to “every province in every language of every people-group” to “destroy, kill and annihilate them all, young and old, women and children, in a single day” (did we miss anything, Haman?) And then in verse 15, just to send a cold chill down the spine, like a chaser of whiskey after a long, deep swig of utter doom, it says that after the couriers left, “The King and Haman sat down to drink.” Having sealed the fate of God’s People, they sit down to clink their glasses together over some fine Merlot.  Reading in slow bites like this keeps you from jumping to the end of the story too soon. I was going to...