Exile and return
Esther was a Jewish orphan raised by her cousin Mordecai in the Persian city of Susa. She became queen to King Xerxes. When the official Haman plotted to kill every Jew in the empire, she went to the king uninvited, at the risk of her life, and her people were saved. Jews remember it each year at Purim.
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The king puts away Queen Vashti and searches for a new queen. Esther is chosen, and at Mordecai’s word she keeps quiet that she is a Jew.
Mordecai will not bow to Haman. Haman gets the king to order every Jew killed on one day.
Mordecai asks Esther to plead with the king. She asks the Jews to fast and says, “If I perish, I perish.”
She goes in unbidden, and the king holds out his scepter. She invites him and Haman to a banquet.
At the second banquet Esther names Haman as the man who wants her people dead. Haman is hanged on his own gallows.
The Jews defend themselves and are saved. Mordecai and Esther set the feast of Purim to remember it.
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For if you insist on keeping silent at this time, relief and rescue will come for the Jews from somewhere else, but you and your father’s household will perish. And who knows whether it was for a time like this that you came into royal power?”
Esther 4:14For such a time as this
“Go and bring together all the Jews who can be found in Susa, and fast on my behalf. Take no food or drink for three days, night and day. My maids and I will fast the same way. After that I will go in to the king, which is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.”
Esther 4:16If I perish, I perish
as the days on which the Jews got relief from their enemies, and as the month that had been turned for them from sorrow into joy and from mourning into a holiday. They were to observe them as days of feasting and joy, of sending portions of food to one another and gifts to the poor.
Esther 9:22Sorrow turned to joy
Questions people ask
Each answer is marked: in the Bible, tradition, readers disagree, or not known.
In the Bible
Not by name, in the Hebrew text. Fasting, timing and reversals run through the story, and most readers see God working out of sight. The Greek version adds prayers that name God; Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include those additions.
Readers disagree
Most scholars identify him with Xerxes I, and many Bibles print “Xerxes”. A few have argued for another Persian king.
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