Lesson 1 - Esther Introduction

[Music] now today we're gonna begin our study of the book of Esther in earnest and as is our custom we're gonna begin with an introductory overview now last week we viewed an instructional film about Esther that gave us a good mental picture of the context and the general happenings in this biblical book for those who missed it and you'd like to obtain it it's the Bible the book of Esther by Trimark videos you can find it easily enough online now the reason that we're moving from Daniel directly into Esther is that it is chronologically fits the sequence the story of Esther is quite unique in the Bible and as such it creates all sorts of interesting difficulties as you're soon gonna see it occurs in Persia and the Persian Empire period we're dealing with an Esther is often called the new Persian Empire which began with King Cyrus around 550 BC and then it extended to about 330 BC the end of Daniel takes place at the beginning of this new Persian Empire that's also called the media Persian Empire so biblically and prophetically speaking the second of this succession of four Gentile world empires as prophesied by Daniel media Persia has now come into being the first that of Nebuchadnezzar's was the Babylonian Empire symbolically speaking that was the head of gold of Nebuchadnezzar's dream statue so it was now replaced by the silver arms and chest or in Daniels parallel vision that you those strange beasts for its symbolism the lion beasts has now been replaced by the bear beast so the silver arms and chest the bear beast the RAM with the two horns all symbolize the same thing the media Persian Empire now we're going to get a big bit technical we're gonna cover a lot of ground rapidly this is after all an overview we're not going to get too deep and I'm not going to give you a Reader's Digest version of Esther as that was the purpose of showing you the film last week so here we go we know that the setting for the book of Esther is sometime between about 485 BC and 460 BC it can't be later than about 460 BC because Ezra that Levite priest who would lead a delegation of Jews back to Judah at that time in order to recompete rebuilding the temple and restoring Jerusalem's walls he's involved in the story of Esther and so had not left yet to return to Judah and Esther occurs after the time of the Persian king Cyrus who was who's the King that ended the Book of Daniel so we get about a 25 year window where the Esther incident seems to have occurred now Esther it's as controversial as the Book of Daniel it seems that even some early rabbis weren't entirely convinced that Esther was much more than a Jewish legendary tale other rabbis believed that the Esther incident happened but they weren't so sure that the Esther scroll belonged as part of the Hebrew Bible many early Christian scholars felt the same way and there were a number of reasons for scepticism chief among those reasons is that God is not mentioned once in the Hebrew version of Esther this brings us to another area of controversy with this book there are a number of versions of it and it depends on your particular Christian denomination or your Jewish sect as to which one of them if any that you accept as authoritative or even as belonging in the Bible at all we're going to delve into this shortly so the controversies surrounding Esther are many is this merely Jewish folklore is it possibly based on some obscure historical act but it's been so embellished over the centuries that have best we could call it a historical novel or novella is it an actual reliable historical event but perhaps not of the level of divine inspiration as say Genesis or the Psalms or the New Testament might it have been written merely as an encouragement to give the Jews of the Diaspora a sense that no matter where they were the Lord would deliver them from their oppressors or was it written only as a means to explain why the feast of Purim exists what is agreed upon is that Esther is told as a story everyone and every age loves a good story now I've spoken to you before that the Bible is made up of many different kinds of literature poetry narrative parable songs or here we encounter a kind of literature that is intentionally constructed as a memorable story and it's told by a gifted storyteller in fact there are a few scholars that would tell you that this story is really a Greek comedy maybe even burlesque now while I think that's taking things a little bit too far there's no doubt that there are all sorts of unexpected twists and turns of the plot in this story a Wester that can cause one to chuckle and there are some pretty sultry parts of it that can bring to some of us at least a flush to our cheeks and because it's a story and it doesn't consist of dire prophetic warnings from God or the presentation of a divine system of laws to be obeyed or a treatise on how to properly worship the elohim of israel Christians and Jews hardly know what to make of it there's no directives from the Lord in it there's no examination of biblical principles or unveiling of new ones no vision of the future rather we have a story we have a story the captivate senses it holds our attention now I've often said that the Bible was made for ordinary people to read and to understand it you don't have to be a priest or a pastor or a professor or a theologian to understand what God has given to us in our Bibles in times long past when literacy was the province only of royalty and aristocrats and priests the common folk only received whatever biblical knowledge that the government and the priesthood allowed them to know in the Middle Ages when there was such a growing hunger by the masses to know God personally there was a thirst to read and to hear his word thousands upon thousands of Christians and Jews were murdered by their religious authorities for possessing even a scrap of holy scripture because those religious authorities insisted on having total control over scriptural knowledge in our era when almost everyone is literate and when Bibles are plentiful and cheap and there are no barriers to access when Bibles are available in almost every known language in existence and offered it almost every breathing level now it is often considered as too boring too hard to understand too hard for us to relate to are just too much information yet here in Esther is a book that is fast moving it's dramatic it's funny it's ironic it's suspenseful and it's just plain enjoyable to read for people of all ages it has good guys bad guys pretty girls it's got an arrogant Gentile king and a beautiful courageous Jewish girl who was thrust into a perilous situation not of her own making what's it a story of now that's not so easy to say it depends on one's point of view too many Jews it's the story of their collective life as a peculiar people scattered among the many Gentile colored cultures where they now lived it speaks of the perils that for some inexplicable reason they inevitably face wherever they might live it's representative of Jewish life and all IRA's since the time before they arrived in the promised land and since after their first exile into a predominantly Gentile world a life that has them wandering into a region settling trying to get along with their Gentile neighbors while also will being the Torah hanging on to their ancient traditions and to their God but they always seem to do it fine for a while things go well but then because the differences between them and the natural citizens of the land where they may now live or just to great assimilation becomes impossible distrust Envy finally hate erupts into violence against the Jews and just when it seems like their extinction is at hand God shows up to deliver a minute nikka time for many Christians Esther is a tender love story of a female hero who uses her womanly wiles or gentle wisdom her extraordinary beauty to win the affections of and even change the attitude of her rather buffoonish husband the king of Persia and then she uses it to rescue her own people it's a kind of ancient Beauty and the Beast tale with some Jews thrown in to add a little bit of flavor then it's all blended together with some danger and a healthy helping of intrigue to provide suspense it's a romance not entirely distinct from the Song of Solomon however their rabbis tend towards saying that Esther is simply the story of Purim and the story of Esther is needed because Purim was not retained in the law of Moses nor is it mentioned anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible thus there needed to be a reason there had to be a defining historical event and an authorizing document about why all Jews were obligated to celebrate Purim and even the anonymous writer of the story of Esther is quite careful not to imply that God has commanded the observance of Purim so Perrine is but a joyous man-made commemoration of a momentous or even symbolic event a commemoration that it almost seems wrong not to have it this is a celebration of Jewishness and all that comes with it the good and the bad therefore Christians have never found a reason to pay too much attention to this book especially not to join in common celebration with the Jewish people most Christians have never even heard of Purim maybe by the time we've concluded our story of Esther we'll have found some reasons why Christians need to reconsider our stance on this holiday no other book of the Bible has come down to us in so many various forms there is no scholarly consensus on the original version or even the one best version there are many copies of Esther written in Hebrew but none of them that we have goes back any further than about the 11th century AD probably around the time of the First Crusade the good news is that because there has always been such painstaking attention paid to copying the Bible by the Hebrew scribes there are almost no differences at all between the various Hebrew manuscripts of Esther or any of the Old Testament books for that matter the bad news is is that because the oldest manuscript of Esther that we have is only a thousand years old there is a huge 1,500 avoid between the estimated time of its writing perhaps around 450 BC and the 11th century AD copy of it that we have and that leaves a lot of questions open about which of the several surviving versions of Esther might be the truest to the original if that even matters now of course we have heard similar arguments for centuries concerning the entire Hebrew Bible especially among the Enlightenment scholars until they were at least partially silenced by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls because the Old Testament copies in Hebrew that we had up to that point they were like Esther not much more than a thousand years old but suddenly with the Dead Sea Scrolls we had large portions of the Hebrew Bible in some places complete Scrolls of the Old Testament books that were at least a thousand years older than anything we've ever had it took us back in time to around a hundred years before Christ save for one Esther Esther was not found among the Dead Sea Scrolls there's a lot of speculations about that there's not even a mention of the book in the vast trove of community documents found along with the Holy Scriptures is copied and maintained by the essence at Qumran as a matter of fact for those of you that would be going with this - - - Israel will be going to Qumran so there's a lot of speculations as to why all this is but almost certainly it's because the essence didn't see it as belonging among all the other books of the Tanakh the Hebrew Bible however because Aramaic had become perhaps the most important language of the region of the Holy Lands and because Aramaic and Hebrew are so closely related there were a number of translations of Esther made in Aramaic as early as the 300s BC so even the most ardent of scriptural doubters admit that at the least pesters a very old book and it was written no later than about the time the Greeks were conquering the media Persian Empire now when the media Persian Empire was eventually conquered by Alexander the Great around 330 BC Greek cultural influence and therefore the Greek language spread like wildfire and of course this affected the Jewish communities of the of the few million diaspora Jews only a handful of the diasporic Jews then spoke Hebrew anymore therefore within a generation or two after Alexander's conquest the need for a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible became apparent the result of that was the Ptolemy king of Egypt commissioned a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek about 250 BC and a formidable group of scholars was assembled in Alexandria Egypt to accomplish that task the result of it is what is today called the Septuagint or the lxx and in many modern many of our modern Christian Bibles are based off of this Greek translation interestingly the book of Esther was included in the original Septuagint proving beyond doubt that it must have existed in Hebrew before 250 BC so that it was available for translation into Greek but other independent Greek versions also arose and with that came several additions to the book of Esther upon those additions and later still with the already biased viewpoint among Christians about the book of Esther it was removed from the Christian Bible and was placed with the apocryphal what literature looks like Maccabees Tobit and not long later some of the church fathers disagreed with this drastic action and they put the early Septuagint version of Esther back into their Bibles but they removed the many editions from the text and they placed them together at the end of the book now of course taken from their context this kind of pile of Greek editions now made little sense we get a better grasp of the problem when we understand that the Greek version of Esther with all of its dubious additions is 274 verses long but the Hebrew version is only a hundred and sixty-seven verses long so the Greek virgin version adds a hundred and seven verses that weren't there at one time gotta be careful what you read that's not all even Josephus got into the act in the first century AD and he wrote his own version of Esther then there is the rabbinical version of Esther that's in the Talmud called megaload Esther and it has its variations as well so when talking about the book of Esther we need to realize there are numerous versions of it even if the kernel of the story and the outcome remains identical now the Jerusalem Bible probably took the best approach to this problem they left the Greek editions in the Bible more or less where they were first placed but they'd italicized them so that it was understood what they what they are there are essentially six major edition to what is believed to be the closest thing we have to the original Esther and I'm gonna point these editions out as we proceed with our study so what was the purpose of making these many additions to the book of Esther more than likely it had to do with making the book work better with Jewish sensibilities after all since there is no mention of God and since the story takes place in an alien cultural setting Persia well then where's the religious significance to it and as I've already mentioned there was a running debate as to whether Esther belongs in the Hebrew Bible at all yet it had already been there a long time as demonstrated by the fact that in 250 BC it was part of what was translated from Hebrew to Greek to form the Septuagint so it seems that some Jewish editors added religious elements to the story to try to quell some of the demands to remove it from the Bible thus indeed within the several additions to Esther the word God is added we find prayers offered up to God and also a sort of divine dream vision is given to Mordecai warning him of impending disaster so now we get the element of prophecy infused into the story so we can see why there's been serious challenges to the credibility of this book in the end however perhaps the only intellectually honest debate about Esther ought to revolve around which of the several versions we have today is the most authentic and the least modified from the original because even the editions don't really change the story of Esther in any significant way except to make it more religious and a little less secular in its tone all other challenges seek to simply overturn the truth of the book of Esther and make it into a Jewish fairy tale and as we look closely at the facts that's just an unwarranted conclusion now when we look at the objections that many scholars Jewish and Christian have offered against the historic authenticity of Esther in the end they amount to mostly their personal views of subjective probability that is what they give is their opinions without evidence based on what they think could or could not have happened at that time for instance they say that some number that is used is too large to be realistic or some circumstances to it is too absurd in their view to be real or most often that no archaeological evidence has ever been found to substantiate the biblical claim it's not that there is some hard physical evidence that has been discovered that makes anything and Esther false rather it is that there's not been sufficient hard evidence in their minds to prove that what happens in Esther is true and this is because for many of these scholars the Bible is a suspect book from beginning to end they're much happier more enthused quicker to believe some record or declaration or oblique narrative in an ancient Assyrian or Babylonian document than they are with the Hebrew documents that form the Bible and usually their bottom line stated reason for this is that there's too much religion mixed with Hebrew history to count the Bible as reliable the addition of spirituality they say makes the Bible useless because they don't believe in spirit in the first place but even if that was a rational reasonable position to take it overlooks that these ancient assyrian and babylonian records that they assumed to be true and accurate also invariably call upon their gods they blame the gods for military defeats or droughts they give them credit for battle victories are good crops even the kings were named after their gods so as it turns out what these scholars have trouble with is anything with the judeo-christian historical background not a religious historical background provided is provided that it's a pagan religious historical background that's ok further the academic notion that all reliable history has to be backed up with archeological archeological finds or it's invalid it's ridiculous on its face if that was the standard we have practically no reliable history of any culture at any time in the history of the world to look back upon with any real assurance our history books would look more like thin pamphlets and as dr. Walter Kaiser Kaiser jr. points out in his archaeology Bible as concerns the book of Esther we know practically nothing of the early Persians except that they along with the Medes were indo-europeans and as dr. C of Kiel points out in his commentary on Esther we have only sparse knowledge of what life was like in the Persian Empire at the time of Esther even less about what Palace life was like among the royalty so for a Bible scholar to declare that such and such couldn't possibly have happened in the Persian culture inside the Persian monarchy is not done so in light of facts it's just their personal opinion well dr. Kaiser made a list of the nine most common reason but so many scholars the majority of modern scholars according to him say that the book of Esther is not historical and yet there's nothing within the story itself that implies it's anything but real there's no parting of the Red Sea there's no manna from heaven type of miracles in it for there to be for them to be skeptical of and nothing claimed that is supernatural or that is inherently naturally impossible in Chapter 1 as the first of the nine in Chapter 1 a feast of 180 days was given for all the bigwigs of the Persian Empire scholars say that to them this amount of time is excessive and therefore it just can't be true but we know that Dirk sees that's the king in the story of Esther was constantly trying to conquer Greece and so it is probable that this feast was mostly about a long time of diplomatic lobbying and a strategic military planning session this wasn't about having a continuous under than 80 day banquet nor should we take it that all the leaders of the Empire were there at the same time nor were when they arrived there that they were therefore there the whole hundred and eighty day period nothing suggests that second in chapter 2 we're told that the virgin girls gathered up for the king of Persia to choose from for a new wife or anointed with perfumes and oils for six months then their bodies were treated with spices and ointments for an additional six months before they're brought before the king once again is combined when year preparation is dismissed as excessive thus not believable yet to take common girls from non aristocratic families and train them and royal court decorum and protocols to heal up their calluses and their blisters and their blemishes and to make them is beautiful and flawless as possible for this hedonistic King to take twelve months to do it's probably about the least amount of time imaginable to accomplish that kind of thing third of all chapter one states that the media Persian Empire consisted of a hundred and twenty seven provinces however the historian Herodotus wrote there was only 20 but this supposed conflict is only founded on the notion because Hirota and Herodotus said there were twenty say trapeze that somehow carries the same meaning is the Hebrew word that's used in Esther maybe nah that just means districts in other words the Persian Empire probably was divided into twenty say trapeze each of it with its own governor but at the same time those twenty say trapeze and Abe entailed some hundred and twenty seven districts consisting of many smaller kingdoms and independent city-states that the Persians had conquered sort of like the state and county system like we use in the USA the number of counties does not equal the number of states so there's no discrepancy that needs to be seen here fourth chapter one states that a decree given by a Persian king is irrevocable and this is seen by some academics is just not believable yet we hear the exact same thing in Daniel chapter 6 in verse nine it says now your majesty issued this decree over your signature so that it cannot be revoked because it's required by the law of the Medes and the Persians which itself is irrevocable there's no question by the way the two different authors from two different eras who had no knowledge of one another these two books of Daniel and Esther well in Chapter three we read of the Persians planning a year in advance to massacre the Jews and then even letting them know about it this says the scholars is too unlikely to accept yet the book explains that the day for this Massacre wasn't set by the king or by a military general even by Haman but it was by divination through the casting of lots by Persian priests and if the Lots gave the propitious month and day something was to happen this of course had to be followed lest the gods be upset and everything go bad and since the King wasn't even really much involved in this process it was Hamad that insisted upon an attack and organized this attack no doubt Hamad was not about to buck with the Kings priests said was the what was the date that the gods wanted this highness thing to occur now chapter 3 says that kamon was an agate scholars say that this seems much too coincidental that Haman would be a descendant of Agag the Amalekites a dreaded enemy of Israel who caused King Saul his crown however there's nothing in this verse that claims that this reference to an a guy has any relation whatsoever to the amela kites no one quite knows what is meant by a guide in this context especially since it had been five centuries since the time of King Saul now vii assuming as most do that King ah swears was but the Greek name for King Xerxes then there is no Persian or Greek record of a life of this king named Vashti which is what the ex Esther's he claims rather the clink ooh Queen was named a mistress however there is a good probability that a mistress is Esther because linguistically Esther and a mistress are nearly identical words eight scholars claim that although Xerxes is certainly a historically identifiable name for a king in that period in Persia Nathan named Mordecai is nowhere else known and Persian records therefore it's just a made-up name however that's a disingenuous claim because in Persian and Babylonian his name is not Mordecai it's Margutta and indeed in Persian and Babylonian Rebeck records the name Marduk ax a Babylonian name is found in fact there's one Persian tablet that's been found that speaks about Xerxes ascension to the throne and in it there's record of a royal accountant residing at Susa the city where the story of Esther takes place whose name was Mordecai Mordecai in Hebrew and finally ninth the claim is the archaeological data has not confirmed the Esther story and as dr. Keiser says while it's rare that physical archaeological data ever confirms a historical event the most usual way for reconstructing historical events is not from archaeology but rather from piecing together data from various documents or even from oral traditions for instance we don't demand that the Mayflower be found in order to believe that the Pilgrims landed on that ship at Plymouth Rock but that's the sort of standard that modern Bible scholars insist must be imposed on the Holy Scriptures otherwise they're to be seen only as Jewish legend and myth so how are we to look at and think about what we'll study an Esther first we can know that it was real the characters were real the event happened was every last detail that we have now accurate likely not the one thing whoever wrote it could not have been inside the palace inside the Kings chambers inside of Esther's chambers inside of Hammonds house and privy to all of those conversations and plots this would have been information gathered from a number of sources some by eyewitnesses some by hearsay besides all historical happenings that are recorded are reported through the lens the culture and the agenda of the person who's writing it and if you don't believe that just compare the various news stories of current events today on almost anything that's happening and at times you wonder if they're even speaking about the same event whether it's the progress of the war in Afghanistan the peace talks that word has a hard time even coming out of my mouth between the Palestinians and the Israelis the theft of national intelligent documents by Edward Snowden or even what the new Obamacare medical system accomplishes or is meant to accomplish will read a number of different viewpoints that often conflict with one another the Bible operates in a similar fashion and books like Esther and by the way especially the New Testament synoptic Gospels are especially vulnerable to the authors personal viewpoint and vantage point but at the least we see a number of important theological issues and themes raised with an ester for instance God's invisible Providence his on full display even though it's not specifically brought to our attention by name the story of Esther is told as a series of improbable if not impossible coincidences that foiled the effort of the evil Haman to gain great power and status / for himself at the same time ridding the Persian Empire of an entire people the Jews because only one among them Mordecai pricked his pride yet for the spiritually oriented person it's obvious that these supposed coincidences were but God guiding history behind the scenes with almost no one Jew or Persian aware of it we also see that God raised up an ordinary people who were living in less than ideal circumstances in a foreign land to do service for him Esther and Mordecai were not aristocrats although Mordecai seemed to have been considered a wise man and probably some type of informal leader of the Jewish people and Seuss it anyway thus God can use anyone even the most unlikely to do the most amazing things if we'll just learn to say yes them like every bone in our body wants to yell no way usually by the way because it's something I'm come Oh unfamiliar inconvenient or well out of our pay grade but he seems to be asking of us I see a Nestor the story of a repeating pattern of irrational hatred for the Jewish people that seems to suddenly come out of nowhere like a microburst from the sky that can fell trees and rip the roofs off of holders all throughout history it seems that one tyrant or another takes some kind of homicidal bent towards the Jews that makes no sense often the Jews are an important cog of the societal machine of whatever nation they might be in and to evict them or to oppress them or to murder them only harms the nation but no matter it's done anyway usually to the detriment of the national leader who led the oppression or the expulsion we see that same thing happening today why does anti-semitism seem to be on the rise in Europe when the Jews are such a small part of European society aren't in most cases nearly invisible why does Europe and the USA believe that the Jews of Israel just have too much land for their own nation when they already have one of the tiniest countries on the planet of which nearly half of it's a barren desert thus the consensus is they need to give some more of it away to an invented people call the Palestinians who have made it their stated goal to eradicate the State of Israel from the face of the earth and to kill all Jews anywhere they might be found on this globe the word most often used today to describe this inability to reach peace in the is intractable that word means something that is uncontrollable impossibly difficult a problem that seems to have no solution but why is this problem intractable because of an irrational hatred by most of the world's Gentiles for the Jewish people what a secular world can't understand however is that this is really a spiritual battle just as it was for Esther Mordecai King Xerxes and Hamas as we're soon gonna read an Esther it was only because Hammond hated but one Jew Mordecai but he decided he was going to hate them all not just personal personally maniacally to the point he felt the Jews shouldn't exist in longer so then he went to the Persian king as a trusted advisor he counseled him that these people were rebellious they were an extreme danger to the Kings Empire and told the king rather the king told him well do whatever you think's best again irrational eradicating the Jews was harmful to his empire simply because they were so numerous they were industrious they greatly contributed to the Empire's economy but he agreed to it anyway because it just seemed unimportant to him we also see a theme of civil disobedience being acceptable to the Lord when it comes to saving God's people from destruction Mordecai defied come on Queen Esther defied her husband the King as well as disobeying some of the amuse laws of the person government and we see that God didn't just miraculously sweep away their danger rather the plan was for the Jews to defend themselves with the sword they would have to fight for their own lives God was on their side of course so while Esther and all Jews of Sousa fasted and prayed to God for three days to find an answer to their dilemma the answer came in the form of battle let that sink in some Jews would lose their lives in order for their people to survive prayer first as a preparation and then screaming into action no passivity no standing on the sidelines some letting somebody else deal with it no praying and sitting on our hands waiting for God to supernaturally handle things and then finally we read about pride how it can destroy and in this case it is the pride of Hamad who fancies himself as being fabulously wealthy possessing a cunning beyond the reach of others and being second in power to the king of Persia he obtained his status through lying and treachery and he was willing to destroy an entire people the Jews to accelerate and cement his position in the royal court he hated Mordecai because Mordecai wouldn't bow down to Haman and his pride just couldn't stand but because of the arrogance that goes hand-in-hand with pride Amon thought his cleverness would be undetectable his strategies impossible to stop and just as he thought all was in his hands the floor gave way and not just he but his entire family was destroyed because of it the old biblical proverb of pride going before the fall was on full display next week will begin Esther chapter one please rise [Music] [Music] issue you

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Keywords: Esther, Old Testament, Torah, Prophet, Seed of Abraham, Torah Class, Tom Bradford, Bible Study

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Length: 50min 55sec (3055 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2019