Queen

Esther 2:1-18

¹After these things, when the anger of King Ahasuerus [Xerxes] had abated, he remembered Vashti and what she had done and what had been decreed against her. ²Then the king’s young men who attended him said, “Let beautiful young virgins be sought out for the king. ³And let the king appoint officers in all the provinces of his kingdom to gather all the beautiful young virgins to the harem in Susa the citadel, under custody of Hegai, the king’s eunuch, who is in charge of the women. Let their cosmetics be given them. ⁴And let the young woman who pleases the king be queen instead of Vashti.” This pleased the king, and he did so. ⁵Now there was a Jew in Susa the citadel whose name was Mordecai, the son of Jair, son of Shimei, son of Kish, a Benjaminite, ⁶who had been carried away from Jerusalem among the captives carried away with Jeconiah king of Judah, whom Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had carried away. ⁷He was bringing up Hadassah, that is Esther, the daughter of his uncle, for she had neither father nor mother. The young woman had a beautiful figure and was lovely to look at, and when her father and her mother died, Mordecai took her as his own daughter. ⁸So when the king’s order and his edict were proclaimed, and when many young women were gathered in Susa the citadel in custody of Hegai, Esther also was taken into the king’s palace and put in custody of Hegai, who had charge of the women. ⁹And the young woman pleased him and won his favor. And he quickly provided her with her cosmetics and her portion of food, and with seven chosen young women from the king’s palace, and advanced her and her young women to the best place in the harem. ¹⁰Esther had not made known her people or kindred, for Mordecai had commanded her not to make it known. ¹¹And every day Mordecai walked in front of the court of the harem to learn how Esther was and what was happening to her. ¹²Now when the turn came for each young woman to go in to King Ahasuerus, after being twelve months under the regulations for the women, since this was the regular period of their beautifying, six months with oil of myrrh and six months with spices and ointments for women— ¹³when the young woman went in to the king in this way, she was given whatever she desired to take with her from the harem to the king’s palace. ¹⁴In the evening she would go in, and in the morning she would return to the second harem in custody of Shaashgaz, the king’s eunuch, who was in charge of the concubines. She would not go in to the king again, unless the king delighted in her and she was summoned by name.  ¹⁵When the turn came for Esther the daughter of Abihail the uncle of Mordecai, who had taken her as his own daughter, to go in to the king, she asked for nothing except what Hegai the king’s eunuch, who had charge of the women, advised. Now Esther was winning favor in the eyes of all who saw her. ¹⁶And 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, ¹⁷the king loved Esther more than all the women, and she won grace and favor 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. ¹⁸Then the king gave a great feast for all his officials and servants; it was Esther’s feast. He also granted a remission of taxes to the provinces and gave gifts with royal generosity.

After Vashti’s ignominious exile from the court of Xerxes, it’s time to find a new wife for the king. Xerxes seems to be an apt ruler if you can tolerate pompous, spoiled, sex-addicted, entitled narcissists. Historians report that he had a massive harem and quite likely several “queens” although the Biblical account of his life does say that he “loved Esther.” If you watch any movies of this story, he is generally painted as a noble hero who loved his wife. From what we know of him, he probably loved the woman he was with at the moment. For a time, that woman was Esther and God used that attraction to save the Jewish nation.

The search for a new queen went nationwide and attractive, virginal women from all over the large kingdom were brought into the palace and put through the long process of preparation for the role. Vashti had been deposed for 4 years by the time Esther is placed on the throne. Being placed in the royal harem was not necessarily a great life for these women. They may have spent only one night with the king and were then relegated to obscurity for the rest of their lives, living in the harem with no purpose, no husband, no children. That would have been Esther’s fate as well had she not found favor with the king.

While Esther is Jewish by birth, we don’t really know how much she practiced the faith. She had clearly been born in Persia to parents (or perhaps even grandparents) who had been carried into captivity generations earlier. She became queen 479bc which would have corresponded to the time of the rebuilding of the Temple and the city wall in Jerusalem by Nehemiah, Ezra, and Zerubbabel. What we do learn in this story is that she comes to embrace her heritage and depends upon God to save the nation.