People of the Bible

Esther

Faith in trial · Around 480 BC · Appears in The book of Esther

Esther is the Jewish orphan who became queen of Persia and risked her life to save her people from destruction. Urged by her cousin Mordecai that she had come to royal position for such a time as this, she went before the king uninvited, saying, If I perish, I perish, and turned the plot against the Jews back on their enemy.

Go, gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, and fast ye for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day: I also and my maidens will fast likewise; and so will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish.Esther 4:16 (KJV)

An orphan becomes a queen

Esther was a young Jewish woman living among the exiles scattered through the Persian empire, an orphan raised by her older cousin Mordecai, who had brought her up as his own daughter. When King Ahasuerus, ruler of a vast empire from India to Ethiopia, deposed his queen and sought a new one, beautiful young women were gathered from across the provinces, and Esther was taken into the palace. On Mordecai's counsel she kept her Jewish identity hidden.

Of all the women, Esther found favor in the eyes of the king, and he set the royal crown upon her head and made her queen. She had risen, an orphan and an exile, to the highest place a woman could hold in the empire, yet she remained under Mordecai's guidance and quietly loyal to her people. Neither she nor anyone else yet knew why God had placed her there, or the terrible danger that was about to make her position a matter of life and death for a whole nation.

A plot to destroy a people

The king advanced a proud and ambitious official named Haman to the highest rank, and commanded all to bow to him. But Mordecai, a Jew, would not bow, and Haman's wounded pride swelled into a monstrous plan. Learning that Mordecai was a Jew, Haman resolved to destroy not just the man but his entire people, and he cast lots to fix the day. He persuaded the king, with a bribe and a lie, to issue an irrevocable decree that on a single appointed day all Jews throughout the empire, young and old, women and children, should be killed and their goods plundered.

When the decree went out, there was great mourning among the Jews, with fasting, weeping, and sackcloth. Mordecai, in mourning at the palace gate, sent word to Esther of the whole matter and urged her to go to the king and plead for her people. Esther hesitated, for to approach the king uninvited meant death unless he extended his golden scepter, and she had not been called for thirty days. It was then that Mordecai sent her the words that have rung down the centuries.

For such a time as this

Mordecai's message to Esther was both a warning and a summons. He told her not to imagine that she would escape in the palace when all the other Jews perished, and that if she kept silent, deliverance would arise for the Jews from another place, but she and her father's house would be destroyed. And then the piercing question: And who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this. Perhaps her whole unlikely rise to the throne had been for this single, dangerous moment.

Esther rose to it. She asked all the Jews of the city to fast with her for three days and nights, and resolved to go to the king though it was against the law, saying, And if I perish, I perish. It was a decision that counted the cost honestly and moved forward in faith anyway. She went before the king in her royal robes, and he received her and held out the golden scepter, and she invited him and Haman to a banquet, and then to a second, choosing her moment with wisdom and nerve.

The deliverance and the feast of Purim

At the second banquet, Esther made her plea. She revealed that she was a Jew and that she and her people had been sold to be destroyed, and when the astonished king demanded to know who had dared such a thing, she said, The adversary and enemy is this wicked Haman. The king's fury turned on Haman, who was hanged on the very gallows fifty cubits high that he had built for Mordecai. What Haman had meant for the Jews fell upon his own head.

Because the original decree could not be revoked, the king issued a new one granting the Jews the right to defend themselves, and on the appointed day they were delivered from their enemies. Mordecai was raised to honor in Haman's place. To remember their rescue, the Jews established the feast of Purim, days of feasting and gladness and gifts to the poor, still kept by the Jewish people to this day as a memorial that mourning was turned into joy.

The turning of the tables

Between Esther's two banquets, God's unseen hand turned the whole story. On the very night Haman built his gallows for Mordecai, the king could not sleep, and he had the royal chronicles read to him, and there he learned that Mordecai had once uncovered a plot and saved his life, and had never been rewarded. In the morning Haman came to ask permission to hang Mordecai, only to be commanded instead to lead the very man he hated through the streets in royal honor, proclaiming the king's delight in him.

It was the first of many reversals. The gallows Haman built for Mordecai became his own, the decree meant to destroy the Jews gave way to their deliverance, and their day of mourning was turned into a feast of joy. The book of Esther is a study in the quiet providence of God, who works through coincidences, sleepless nights, and human courage to overturn the plans of the wicked and to lift up the lowly, without once being named, yet present on every page.

Her character and where she points to Christ

Esther grows across her story from a quiet young woman doing as she is told into a queen of courage and resolve. She weighs the danger honestly, then acts with wisdom and nerve, timing her appeal and staking her own life on her people's behalf. Her famous words, If I perish, I perish, capture a faith that counts the cost and moves forward anyway, and she used the position she was given not for herself but for the deliverance of others. Remarkably, her book never once mentions the name of God, yet his providence is everywhere, turning coincidence into rescue and placing the right person exactly where she was needed.

Esther is the deliverer who steps between her people and death, willing to lay down her own life to save them, and in that willingness the church sees a reflection of Jesus. Where Esther risked death and was spared, Jesus embraced death itself to rescue his people from a doom they could not escape. Her hidden identity, revealed at the decisive moment to save many, and her intercession before the king on behalf of the condemned, point to the King who came unrecognized, laid down his life, and ever lives to intercede for those he came to save.

A note on the sources: everything above is drawn from the biblical text itself. Where a detail comes from later tradition rather than Scripture, it is named as tradition. Dates for the earliest figures are traditional and approximate, and Scripture does not always give them. The aim is to tell each life honestly, and to let it do what the whole Bible does, point to Jesus Christ the Lord.

Related: Ruth · Nehemiah · All the people of the Bible