Esther (Greek)

No. 194 Esther (Greek) 7:1-5
Esther is a Jewish woman who has become queen of Persia without her origin being known. Haman, the king's highest official, has obtained a decree to destroy every Jew in the empire, unaware that the queen is...
No. 309 Esther (Greek) 6:6-14
This is one of the great comic reversals in the Bible, and it turns entirely on an assumption. The king, having just remembered that Mordecai once saved his life and was never rewarded, asks Haman a question...
No. 709 Esther (Greek) 5:1-6
This is the moment the book of Esther has been building toward. A decree engineered by Haman has doomed the Jews of the empire, and Esther, the Jewish queen, has decided to go to the king to plead for her...
No. 785 Esther (Greek) 7:6-10
Esther has waited through two banquets, and now, when the king asks a third time what she wants, she lays it out. There is a plot to destroy her and her people, she says, and when the king demands to know who...
No. 811 Esther (Greek) 3:1-6
The king promotes Haman above all his officials and commands everyone in the palace gate to bow down to him, and everyone does, except one man. Mordecai the Jew will not bow. Day after day the other officials...
No. 917 Esther (Greek) 9:18-32
The threat is over. Haman's plot to annihilate the Jews has collapsed on his own head, and now Mordecai writes to the Jews across the empire to fix the memory in place. The fourteenth and fifteenth of Adar are...
No. 1041 Esther (Greek) 8:1-6
Haman is dead, his plot exposed, and the king gives Esther his estate and makes Mordecai his new second-in-command. But the danger is not over. The decree Haman engineered, ordering the slaughter of the Jews...
No. 1249 Esther (Greek) 4:9-14
Haman's decree to destroy the Jews has gone out, and Mordecai sends word to Queen Esther, urging her to go to the king and plead for her people. Esther hesitates: anyone who approaches the king unsummoned may...
No. 1270 Esther (Greek) 8:7-17
Haman is dead, and the king empowers Esther and Mordecai to write a new decree in his name, sealed with the royal ring, which cannot be revoked. Couriers race it across the empire from India to Ethiopia: the...
No. 1502 Esther (Greek) 2:1-11
After the king of Persia has banished Queen Vashti, a search is made throughout the empire for beautiful young women to replace her, and they are gathered into the king's harem. Among them is Esther, a Jewish...
No. 1577 Esther (Greek) 1:9-13
At the height of a lavish, days-long feast, the king of Persia, merry with wine, commands his officials to bring Queen Vashti before his guests to display her beauty. Vashti refuses to come. The king,...
No. 1905 Esther (Greek) 4:1-8
When Mordecai learns of the decree to destroy the Jews, he tears his clothes, puts on sackcloth and ashes, and cries out through the city; and the Jews everywhere mourn. Queen Esther, safe in the palace, is...
No. 1917 Esther (Greek) 2:19-23
Mordecai, sitting at the king's gate, overhears two of the king's officials plotting to assassinate the king. He reports it through Esther, the plot is investigated and confirmed, and the conspirators are...
No. 1941 Esther (Greek) 9:12-17
After the Jews are delivered from the destruction Haman had plotted, defending themselves against those who rose to attack them, they gather and, the text notes, take no plunder for themselves. And then, their...
No. 2921 Esther (Greek) 4:28-47
Facing the decree to destroy her people, Queen Esther does not go first to the king; she goes first to God. She takes off her royal robes, puts on the garments of mourning, covers her head with ashes, and...
No. 3000 Esther (Greek) 2:12-18
After the long months of preparation, Esther's turn comes to go before the king. She follows exactly the counsel of the keeper of the women, asking for nothing beyond it, and she finds favor with everyone who...
No. 3400 Esther (Greek) 9:1-11
The day fixed for the destruction of the Jews arrives, but the tables have turned. Through Esther and Mordecai's courage, and through the hidden providence of God, the decree of death has been met by a...
No. 3414 Esther (Greek) 3:7-15
Haman, consumed by hatred for one man, engineers a decree to destroy an entire people. He casts lots to fix the day, buys the king's approval with silver and slander, and the king carelessly hands over his...
No. 3677 Esther (Greek) 1:1-8
This passage joins two very different scenes. First, Mordecai's dream: a vision of tumult and conflict, two great serpents, nations arrayed against the righteous, and a cry to God that rises like a great...
No. 3929 Esther (Greek) 1:14-22
This passage records a piece of palace intrigue at the court of a proud and pleasure-loving king. When Queen Vashti refuses to be displayed before the king's drunken banquet, his fearful, self-important...
No. 4092 Esther (Greek) 4:15-27
Facing the threat of her people's destruction, and knowing that to approach the king unbidden could cost her life, Esther makes a courageous resolve. Gather all the Jews, she tells Mordecai, and fast for me...
No. 4183 Esther (Greek) 5:7-14
Haman has reached the height of success, wealth, honor, the king's favor, and now an exclusive invitation to the queen's private banquet. He goes home glad and boasts to his family of all his riches and glory....
No. 4227 Esther (Greek) 6:1-5
On the very night that mattered, the king could not sleep. To pass the sleepless hours, he had the royal chronicles read to him, and the reading fell on the record of how Mordecai had once foiled a plot...
No. 4240 Esther (Greek) 10:1-14
Looking back on all that had happened, the deliverance of the Jews from Haman's plot, Mordecai draws one clear conclusion: these things have come from God. He recalls a dream he had been given, and now sees it...