Next year at Grace Church we’ll do a short series on the book of Esther. As I’ve begun to research this book a number of things became immediately apparent which I don’t think I previously appreciated. Although the setting is historical, the content is theatrical and this book was written by an author with an eye for irony, comedy and dramatic set-pieces.

The key to the book is, unsurprisingly, the role that the beautiful Hadassah or Esther plays. Picked to be part of the Persian kings harem, she ends up elevated to the position of queen. Yet the way in which Esther becomes queen causes some Christians a few issues. As Xerxes searches for a new queen to replace Vashti, he gets the pick of the most beautiful women in his vast empire who will all get a lavish year long beauty regimen before they each get sent for one night with the king. After that, he’ll only see them again if he remembers them and calls them by name.

And it’s that night that is the issue. Here’s the text in various translations.

ESV: And when Esther was taken to King Ahasuerus, into his royal palace, in the tenth month, which is the month of Tebeth, in the seventh year of his reign, 17 the king loved Esther more than all the women, and she won grace and favour in his sight more than all the virgins, so that he set the royal crown on her head and made her queen instead of Vashti.

NLT: And the king loved Esther more than any of the other young women. He was so delighted with her that he set the royal crown on her head and declared her queen instead of Vashti.

NIV: Now the king was attracted to Esther more than to any of the other women, and she won his favour and approval more than any of the other virgins. So he set a royal crown on her head and made her queen instead of Vashti.

The girls before the night with the king were in the ‘house of maidens’ and after her night with the king went to the ‘house of concubines’. Now it’s true that in 2:19, after Esther’s night with Xerxes, it says ‘the virgins gathered together’ but that is more likely a collective noun for all the women in the harem rather than suggesting that after a night with the king they are all still virgins.

Debra Reid says in her commentary, “The verb meaning ‘to go into/to enter’ occurs three times in these verses and it is loaded with sexual overtones (cf. Ruth 4:13 and 2 Sam. 11:4)…Note that after their night with the king the women were presumably consigned to a lifetime of waiting to see if the king would call them again. It is clear that this selection process was as much about sexual performance as it was about natural or enhanced beauty. The end of the verse suggests a rather depressing fate for each woman, which adds tension to Esther’s reappearance in the narrative.”¹

Or as Preston Sprinkle says, “I’ll let you do the exegesis on what went on that night, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t playing cards.”².

However in their book The Big Book of Bible Difficulties, authors Norman Geisler & Thomas Howe write,

It is not clear that participants in the pageant had to do anything explicitly immoral to be in the contest. Knowing Esther’s character, we can be sure she would have refused to do anything contrary to God’s law

p.220

Uh huh.

I think the one thing we can be sure about when it comes to characters in the Bible is that they are far more morally complex and flawed than that.

They actually explain it better in their first point that it is not at all clear that Esther had much of a choice. Certainly less choice than Bathsheba I suspect.

One does not defy a Persian king’s commands and live to tell the tale. We see this in Daniel where he and his friends do defy the king and as a result are sentenced to death. Which is kind of the point later in the story when Esther is challenged to approach the king against the customs and says, “if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16). Esther hadn’t refused the king a night with her, she hadn’t refused marriage but now she must go to him when he hadn’t called her. Now at the crucial moment she makes an immensely courageous choice.

If we airbrush Esther into something she wasn’t the shrewdness, palace smarts and great courage which end up shining far more than her beauty we take away from the drama of the story. Esther wasn’t above using her beauty to her advantage or even just her survival.

Yet God who appears to be relegated to the shadows and the sidelines is still sovereignly at work to rescue his people whether they acknowledge Him or credit Him (it doesn’t appear that they do) in the end. Perhaps He is still doing that even today.

In a book that famously doesn’t explicitly mention God (there are a few sentences where the first few words start with YHWH though) and is full of drunken banquets, excess, immorality, gruesome deaths and attempted genocide we do it a disservice by making Esther out to be a Disney princess. Don’t try and clean up the Scriptures, it is far more interesting if we don’t.

1. Debra Reid, Esther: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 13, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Nottingham, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 2008), 81. [↩]
2. The Esther you never knew [↩]