Esther - maybe not about Esther? Maybe not such a great morality tale...

The readings - Days 150 and 151 - Esther 1-10

Esther is an interesting story. Weighing in at only 10 chapters, it's a pretty easy story to read in one sitting, which is why I thought I'd combine posts to include both halves of it at once.

However, unlike many of the other short, punchy books bearing a specific name throughout the Bible (Ruth, Job, Philemon, etc) it's actually a bit hard to tell whose story Esther really is.



The obvious choice is that it's the story of Esther herself, Jewish girl raised by her cousin (cousin, mind you - didn't know that until this reading) Mordecai and then collected into the Persian king's harem before ultimately being made queen in the place of the previous, displeasing-to-her-husband, monarch.

This is certainly the most popular choice, at least among popular conception and Sunday School lessons, and it's not hard to see why. A beautiful young heroine, standing up for her people in the face of grave personal peril, coming to the rescue of her cousin in his time of need, and occupying a singularly high place in the ruling Persian empire.

I don't mean to belittle Esther's accomplishments at all, either, but reading through it I could help but notice that despite the high and lofty pedestal of feminism to which Esther (the book and the person) is often raised, she doesn't actually do all that much in the story. I'm just not sure that the book reads like a champion's call for feminism.

For starters, the first queen is deposed and exiled for not coming to her husbands beck and call. Not only that, the story says that he wants to see her after he's already been partying and drinking hard for seven days. My wife loves me immensely, and I can guarantee that if I went on a week-long bender and then sent her a text asking her to come hang out, there would be a lot of things that would happen before she'd come running over to cheerily support me in my drunken stupor. But Vashti refuses, and the king sulks (as so many kings do so well in the Bible). He talks to his friends (his wise men) about what's to be done with this Queen Vashti, and they all reply that something severe must happen, because if their wives found out that they could just refuse to come to their drunken asses at a moment's notice all chaos would break out. I'm not lying. That is why they advised the king to lay down some seriously harsh punishment, which he obviously does.

Then, he sends men to all corners of his considerable empire to collect hot young ladies to join his harem, who are then dolled up for an entire year before they're brought in for a night with the king and then sent on their way, waiting for call-backs like a pile of nervous American Idol contestants. Only for sex. Whether they want to or not.

So Esther, who is hot, is brought to the king, who evidently likes her because he makes her queen. Then she intervenes twice on behalf of her people, and throws a party. And that - if you'll forgive a small amount of simplification and summary for the sake of brevity - is that. That's her doing. It's important, no doubt, because without her intervention, who's to say that the edict reversing the king's previous order to let anyone who wants to kill any Jews they like would ever have been issued, and who's to say that Mordecai would  have escaped the clutches of his enemy, Haman.

So that's Esther's part in Esther.

The thing is, if the closing sentences of the book are anything to go on, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the main character in the story may actually be Mordecai, since the book closes with a recap of his general awesomeness, and the rest of the book sees him popping up (often in actual positions of power and action) more often than the new queen.

I wonder if the reason that this isn't the popular choice for interpretation is that if Esther's the heroine, then the story tends to be fairly uplifting, but if Mordecai and his machinations are the central point, then you can't possibly avoid the fact that he is elevated to his eventual lofty position by ordering the slaughter of more than 75,000 people in a single day, and personally overseeing the murder of more than 800 over the course of two days in his own city.

To put that into perspective, on July 1, 1916 - the first day of the Battle of the Somme, quite possibly the single bloodiest battle in history, the British army lost nearly 20,000 soldiers (35,000 more were injured). So across the Persian empire, in one day, Jews killed nearly four times the number of people killed in one of the most violent days of the 20th century.

That's a tough thing to get over.

And then they declared a holiday to mark the occasion.

Anyway...

I like the story told in Esther - I'm just not sure who it's about or if it's nearly as uplifting and edifying as it's almost universally portrayed to be...