Esther: The Book That Never Mentions God

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown.

When: It is set at the Persian court under King Ahasuerus, usually identified with Xerxes I (486–465 BC). It was probably written between the 400s and 200s BC.

Where it fits: Set among the Jews who stayed in Persia after the exile, in the gap between Ezra 6 (the Temple finished) and Ezra 7 (Ezra’s mission). Ezra 4:6 mentions the same king, Ahasuerus.

Where I quote it: Never.

If you only read three chapters: Esther 4, Esther 7 and Esther 9.

Words to Know

Purim — the festival that celebrates the rescue in this book. The name comes from pur, a lot, like a die thrown to choose a day.

Ahasuerus — the Hebrew form of the Persian king’s name, usually identified with Xerxes.

Agagite — a descendant of Agag, king of the Amalekites, Israel’s ancient enemy. The villain, Haman, is one.

The Additions — six passages added to Esther in the Greek translation. They put prayers and God into the story.

The Book in Brief

Esther is a story in ten chapters, set in the Persian capital, Susa. It tells how a Jewish queen saves her people. God is never named.

In chapter 1, King Ahasuerus, who rules 127 provinces from India to Ethiopia, holds a long feast. Drunk, he orders Queen Vashti to appear before his guests. She refuses, and he removes her. In chapter 2, young women are brought to the palace, and the king chooses Esther, a Jewish orphan raised by her cousin Mordecai. She keeps her people secret. Mordecai uncovers a plot against the king, and it is written in the royal records.

In chapter 3 the king promotes Haman the Agagite. Everyone bows to Haman except Mordecai. Furious, Haman gets the king to order the destruction of every Jew in the empire, on a day chosen by casting lots, the pur. In chapter 4 Mordecai tells Esther she must plead with the king, though going to him unsummoned could cost her life. She asks the Jews of Susa to fast for three days, then goes in. In chapter 5 she invites the king and Haman to a banquet, and then to a second one. Haman is delighted, but the sight of Mordecai still enrages him, and at his wife’s urging he has a gallows built to hang him.

In chapter 6 the king cannot sleep, has the records read, and finds that Mordecai was never rewarded. He asks Haman how to honor a man he delights in. Haman, thinking it is himself, describes a royal parade, and must then lead Mordecai through it. In chapter 7, at the second banquet, Esther tells the king that Haman plans to destroy her people. Haman is hanged on his own gallows.

In chapter 8 Mordecai is given Haman’s place. A royal order cannot be undone, so a second order lets the Jews defend themselves. In chapter 9 they do so on the appointed day, and the book says seventy-five thousand of their enemies die in the provinces. They take no plunder. Mordecai and Esther set up two days of feasting each year, called Purim. Chapter 10 ends with Mordecai second only to the king.

Read the Hebrew book of Esther from beginning to end. You will not find the word God. There is no prayer, no Temple, no sacrifice, no mention of the Law. The Jews in this story fast, but the book never says to whom.

When the book was translated into Greek, the translators added six long passages, about a hundred verses, full of prayers and dreams and the name of God.¹ Those additions are still in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. In Protestant Bibles, if they appear at all, they are in the Apocrypha.

So you have two books of Esther. In one, God is everywhere. In the other, God is never named, and the people have to save themselves.

Go deeperThe Greek Esther, and the note at its end

The Greek Esther ends with a note, like a copyist’s signature. It says that in the fourth year of the reign of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, a man named Dositheus, who said he was a priest and Levite, and his son Ptolemy brought the present letter of Purim to Egypt. It says that Lysimachus, son of Ptolemy, of the community in Jerusalem, had translated it.²

Several Ptolemies had queens named Cleopatra, so the year cannot be fixed. Scholars have proposed 114 BC, 78–77 BC or 48 BC. Whichever year it was, Esther had been translated into Greek, and carried to Egypt, by the first century BC.²

The Greek is not a single text. Besides the main Septuagint form there is a second Greek text, known as the Alpha Text, which is shorter and tells parts of the story differently. Both are more openly religious than the Hebrew. The six Additions of the main form bring in the dream of Mordecai, the prayers of Mordecai and Esther, and the full texts of the king’s two decrees.¹³

So by my day Esther was already in circulation in two languages and in more than one form.

The story

The king of Persia shows off his wealth for six months, then throws a seven-day banquet. On the seventh day, drunk, he orders his queen, Vashti, to come and show off her beauty to his guests. She refuses (Esther 1:10–12).

His advisers panic. If the queen can say no, every wife in the empire will say no. So Vashti is deposed, and a decree goes out to every province that every man should rule his own house (Esther 1:22). The book is laughing at them.

A new queen is chosen by a kind of beauty contest. She is Esther, a young Jewish orphan raised by her cousin Mordecai. She hides that she is Jewish.

Mordecai refuses to bow down to the king’s chief minister, Haman (Esther 3:2). Haman is so enraged that he decides to destroy not only Mordecai but every Jew in the empire. He casts lots, the pur, to pick the day. He offers the king ten thousand talents of silver for the right to do it (Esther 3:7–9). The king hands him his signet ring and says, essentially, do what you like.

For such a time as this

Mordecai sends word to Esther. She must go to the king and plead for her people.

But anyone who goes to the king without being summoned can be put to death. Esther is afraid.

Mordecai sends back the line the book turns on: Don’t think to yourself that you will escape in the king’s house any more than all the Jews … Who knows if you haven’t come to the kingdom for such a time as this? (Esther 4:13–14).

And Esther answers: I will go in to the king, which is against the law; and if I perish, I perish (Esther 4:16).

Notice the words who knows. Mordecai does not say God put her there. He only asks. Nobody in this book has a vision. They have to act without one.

The gallows

Esther invites the king and Haman to two banquets. At the second, she tells the king that someone has sold her people to be destroyed. Who is he, and where is he who dared presume in his heart to do so? the king asks. An adversary and an enemy, even this wicked Haman! (Esther 7:5–6).

Haman is hanged on the very pole he had built for Mordecai (Esther 7:10).

Under Persian law in this story, a royal decree cannot be cancelled. So the king issues a second decree letting the Jews defend themselves. On the appointed day, they kill their attackers. The book says seventy-five thousand died across the provinces (Esther 9:16).

The book ends with a feast, and a law for keeping it every year. Days of feasting and gladness, sending presents of food to one another, and gifts to the needy (Esther 9:22).

Go deeperHow Purim is kept

The book sets the days of the festival: Mordecai wrote to the Jews to keep the fourteenth and fifteenth of Adar, the twelfth month, in late winter (Esther 9:20–22). Esther joined him in confirming it (Esther 9:29–32). The Jews of the villages kept the fourteenth, and those in the city of Susa the fifteenth (Esther 9:18–19). The Mishnah later settled it the same way. Most places keep the fourteenth, and cities that had been walled since the days of Joshua keep the fifteenth.⁴

An early sign of the festival outside the book is in 2 Maccabees, written in Greek around 100 BC. It dates a victory over Nicanor to the thirteenth of Adar, the day before “Mordecai’s day,” which is the fourteenth.⁵

By the time of the Talmud, the whole scroll, the megillah, was read aloud twice, once in the evening and once in the morning.⁶ The four things the book lists became the heart of the festival: feasting, gladness, presents of food to one another, and gifts to the needy. Maimonides, the great Jewish teacher of the 1100s AD, ruled that a person should spend more on gifts to the poor than on the feast or on gifts to friends.⁷

That last ruling is worth noticing. The book itself puts a duty to the poor into the festival, and the rabbis took it seriously.

Is it history?

Most scholars read Esther as a historical novel, not a record.

No Persian source mentions Vashti, Esther, Haman or Mordecai as queen or minister. The Greek historian Herodotus names Xerxes’ queen as Amestris. If Mordecai was one of the exiles taken from Jerusalem in 597 BC, as the book may say, he would have been over a hundred by the time of Xerxes. And there is no evidence for a Persian law that could never be revoked.⁸

The book does know the Persian court well. It knows the palace at Susa, the royal messengers and the customs of the banquet. It is a story told by people who lived under Persian rule and knew how it felt to depend on the whim of a king.

Go deeperThe king behind the story

Ahasuerus is the Hebrew form of the Persian name Khshayarsha, which the Greeks wrote as Xerxes. He ruled from 486 to 465 BC. He is best known for the great invasion of Greece in 480 BC, when his fleet was beaten at Salamis and the army he left behind was beaten at Plataea the next year.⁹

The book never mentions the war, but its dates fit around it. The great feast is in the king’s third year (Esther 1:3), about when, by Herodotus’s account, he was preparing that invasion. Some readers link the feast with the council of nobles Herodotus says Xerxes called to plan the war, but the book does not say so. Esther is taken to the king in the tenth month of his seventh year (Esther 2:16). If years are counted as the Persians counted them, that was the winter of 479–478 BC, after the invasion of Greece had failed.⁹¹⁰

Herodotus also describes the Persian messenger service. Riders were stationed along the royal road, and each passed the message to the next. He says nothing mortal travels faster.¹¹ The king’s decrees go out the same way, by couriers (Esther 3:13), and the second set by couriers on royal horses (Esther 8:10, 14).

Greek writers say Xerxes died in 465 BC in a palace plot. Artabanus, the captain of his guard, killed him with the help of a eunuch. Plots like the one Mordecai uncovers in chapter 2 were a real danger at that court.¹²

The argument over Esther

My people argued over this book. It is missing from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The earliest surviving Christian list of Old Testament books, from about 170, leaves it out.¹³

Fifteen hundred years after my time, Martin Luther said at his dinner table that he wished Esther and 2 Maccabees did not exist at all, because they were too Jewish.¹⁴ You should know the kind of man who said that, and what his words about the Jews helped to do later.

What it gives you

So why keep a book that never mentions God?

Because most of life is like the book of Esther. Most people never see a burning bush. They live under powers they cannot control, and they have to decide, without a voice from heaven, whether to risk themselves for other people.

Esther did not know that God had put her there. She went anyway. If I perish, I perish.

And Mordecai would not bow to a man who demanded it. In my scriptures, the refusal to bow is where the rescue starts.

I am sometimes asked which festival I went up to in John’s gospel, when John only calls it a feast of the Jews (John 5:1). Some have guessed Purim. Nobody knows.¹⁵

Check It Yourself

Look up: Esther 4:12–17.

You will find: “for such a time as this” and “if I perish, I perish,” in a story where nobody hears from God.

Then read the whole book and try to find the word God.

The Short Version

• The Hebrew book of Esther never mentions God. The Greek translation added prayers and God’s name.
• A young Jewish queen risks her life to stop a plan to destroy her people: “If I perish, I perish.”
• Most scholars read it as a historical novel, set at a court its writer knew well.
• It is the one book of the Hebrew scriptures missing from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it was left off the earliest Christian list.
• Purim includes gifts to the needy, by the book’s own command.