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Did an orphan girl from an exiled people dream of one day becoming queen of all Persia?

Dalrock
August 18, 2018

When the king’s order and edict had been proclaimed, many young women were brought to the citadel of Susa and put under the care of Hegai. Esther also was taken to the king’s palace and entrusted to Hegai, who had charge of the harem. 9 She pleased him and won his favor

And Esther won the favor of everyone who saw her

17 Now the king was attracted to Esther more than to any of the other women, and she won his favor 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.

—Excerpts from Esther 2, NIV

Commenter Robin Munn raised an interesting question in response to my last post:

I have to disagree with the Esther example, at least as an example of a woman pursuing a man for marriage. She didn’t pursue Ahasuerus for marriage; his “talent scouts” picked her out for his harem and she had no choice in the matter. She later pursued him to solicit his favor for her people, but that illustrates a different point than the one you’re going for here.

Ruth, OTOH, is a perfect example to illustrate your point.

This encouraged me to go back and read the beginning of the Book of Esther again.  He is right that we aren’t told that Esther wanted to become the queen of the land.  We also aren’t told that her “uncle” Mordecai instructed her to try to become queen of Persia.  All we know is that she was found to be one of the most beautiful virgins in all of Persia, and was therefore brought to the palace to compete with all of the other beautiful virgins for the king’s favor.

What happens next depends on your worldview.  Imagine the story from the perspective of a Hebrew woman.  Right off the bat, Esther is declared one of the most beautiful women in the ancient world.  Esther is then forced to undergo a full year of luxurious beauty treatments & pampering in order to compete in something similar to the reality series “The Bachelor”.  She also has no choice but to wear the best fashion in the world and have sex with the most powerful (and therefore sexiest) man in the ancient world.  Esther, the nobody from nowhere, beats all of the Persian bitches and becomes revered throughout the land.  She was the it woman in the ancient world.  Her status was so high that when she threw a dinner party, everyone wanted to be invited.

If you are familiar with the story you will remember Haman, the man who was so powerful he was able to have it decreed that the Jews would be killed and their wealth plundered.  At the height of Haman’s power and prestige his greatest boast was that Esther selected him and only him for the honor of attending her dinner party (Esther 5:10-13, NIV):

Calling together his friends and Zeresh, his wife, 11 Haman boasted to them about his vast wealth, his many sons, and all the ways the king had honored him and how he had elevated him above the other nobles and officials. 12 “And that’s not all,” Haman added. “I’m the only person Queen Esther invited to accompany the king to the banquet she gave. And she has invited me along with the king tomorrow. 13 But all this gives me no satisfaction as long as I see that Jew Mordecai sitting at the king’s gate.”

Lowly Esther won the women’s intrasexual competition jackpot.  She was literally the world champion of the competition!  And all of this was just setting the table for her to be forever remembered for saving her people.

But we see things differently in the modern world.  If you are a women’s studies major you will view the same story through a bitter feminist lens:

I feel very, very sorry for Esther. I hate movies and books that portray her and Xerxes’ relationship as a love story. She had to “audition” for a night to be chosen by him, and that’s pretty darn ugly, no matter how you slice it. We need to stop romanticizing it. She was taken into a harem. It’s basically sex trafficking.

But the moral of the story, to me, is that God will use us even in our worst situations, and that God sees even in our worst situations, and sometimes allows things to happen for the greater good. But He always sees.

We don’t need to “pretty” things up. Life can be awfully ugly. But God still sees!

I should clarify here that I don’t think Robin Munn is a bitter feminist.  But the bitter feminist lens has affected the way the Book of Esther is interpreted in our feminist age.

Either way, we aren’t told in the Book of Esther whether Esther wanted to have sex with the sexiest man in the world and become queen of all Persia.  While I think it is fair to assume that the original audience of the book would expect that she did want this, the Bible is silent on the question.  But regardless of how you answer the question, it doesn’t change the fact that it was Esther who had to win over the king, not the other way around.  This is true not only when she has to beat the other women to become queen.  It is also true (as Robin Munn notes) when she has to save the Jews.  In fact, in order to even speak to the king Esther has to first risk death to win his favor.  Where the Courtly Love rewrite of the story would have King Ahasuerus submitting to Esther in an effort to win a sign of her favor, Esther has to demonstrate her submission to King Ahasuerus in the hope that he will point his scepter in her direction.  If she fails to win his favor, she and all of the Jews will die.  Esther is so submissive that she tells the king she wouldn’t have even bothered asking him to intervene if she and her people were merely sold into slavery (Esther 7:2-4, NIV):

…the king again asked, “Queen Esther, what is your petition? It will be given you. What is your request? Even up to half the kingdom, it will be granted.”

3 Then Queen Esther answered, “If I have found favor with you, Your Majesty, and if it pleases you, grant me my life—this is my petition. And spare my people—this is my request. 4 For I and my people have been sold to be destroyed, killed and annihilated. If we had merely been sold as male and female slaves, I would have kept quiet, because no such distress would justify disturbing the king.[a]”

But even the question of whether Esther wanted to become queen of all Persia has a feminist root.  In many ways Esther is like Daniel, another Jew who ended up in Persia after the Jews were carried away.  Both Esther and Daniel found themselves and their people on the wrong end of a death decree by the king as a result of trickery by Persian enemies.  Both found favor with the king, glorified God, and saved their people.  We don’t ask if Daniel wanted to become an adviser to the king, because either way it was a tremendous honor, and more importantly it was a required part of God’s plan.  Daniel was faithful to God and played the cards he was dealt.  So did Esther.  In Esther’s case this meant first winning the competition to become queen, and then winning the king over again to save the Jews.

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Post Information
Title Did an orphan girl from an exiled people dream of one day becoming queen of all Persia?
Author Dalrock
Date August 18, 2018 8:57 PM UTC (5 years ago)
Blog Dalrock
Archive Link https://theredarchive.com/blog/Dalrock/did-an-orphan-girl-from-an-exiled-people-dream-of.6995
https://theredarchive.com/blog/6995
Original Link https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/did-an-orphan-girl-from-an-exiled-people-dream-of-one-day-becoming-queen-of-all-persia/
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