Lesson 2 - Esther 1

[Music] chapter one a Wester is really not part of the main plot of the story rather some of the primary players are going to be introduced and the scene will be set after all this is a story it's told by an expert storyteller so it's structured that way here the royal life of Persian monarchs is portrayed in all of its decadent extravagance ease we see how focused the royal court is upon the trappings of government how those in power can devolve into spending their time on the most ridiculous matters that are so trivial but they think it's a priority naturally these matters are what affects them the most on a personal level matters that in their minds might affect their wealth their status their image or their egos and when we open our story of Esther the new Persian Empire is a relatively young Empire this second of the four Gentile world empires predicted by Daniel his prophecies is only about 50 years old and what we must always keep in mind is that in the main each of these empires that arise merely takes an empire that was already in existence and it converts it to a new ethnic government that is the Babylonians took an empire that was already established by the Assyrians and made it their own the Babylonians certainly added territory wherever possible they modified the laws and the tax systems to suit them but what it really mostly amounted to was a change of government administer raishin by force a coalition of the Medes and Persians had recently conquered the Babylonian Empire and now made it their own the ethnic Chaldean ruling dynasty that had governed that Babylonian Empire was replaced now by the ethnic ruling dynasty of the Medes and the Persians and so now it was the Persian Empire and of course all kings of empires well they want their empire to be greater still now some do it by trying to improve and refine the territory they already have to make it richer others have the conquest of other kingdoms and lands in mind to make their holdings even larger most kings of empires do both to some degree now King Cyrus who was the first king of the new Persian Empire had his hands full simply consolidating his power and governing this Empire as it was when he took it from the Babylonians he was also somewhat idealistic so he sought to write the many wrongs that he felt the Babylonian government had perpetrated upon its people and thus one of the first acts was to free the Jewish people to go back home to Judah now the king in our story of Esther however well he had different motivations and goals as the fourth king of the media Persian Empire he was the benefactor of what his predecessors had accomplished not unlike King Solomon he inherited a stable Empire huge tax revenues a gigantic amount of wealth was in the state treasury so this King lived in the lap of luxury and he sat around his palace all day consulted consulting with his lap dogs who were masquerading as advisors and thinking of ways to spend his bottomless fortune his ego and his legacy were his main concerns so he had Macedonia and surrounding areas typically in our Bibles called Greece he had them in his sights as a means to expand his empire for the sake of his reputation let's read Esther chapter 1 you have a complete Jewish Bible its page 1089 Esther chapter 1 these events took place in the time of a hush hush yes the Akash barouche who ruled over 127 provinces from India to Ethiopia it was in those days when King a hush brush sat on his royal throne in Shushan the capital in the third year of his reign that he gave a banquet for all of his officials and courtiers the army of Persia and media the nobles and the provincial officials were in attendance he displayed the dazzling wealth of his kingdom and his great splendor for a long time for 180 days and at the end of that time the King gave a 7-day banquet in the courtyard of the Royal Palace garden for all the people both great and small there in Shushan the capital there were white cotton curtains and blue hangings fastened to silver rods with cords of fine linen and purple the columns were marble the couches for reclining table were of gold and silver on a mosaic flooring of malachite and marble mother-of-pearl and onyx drinks were served in gold goblets with each goblet different from the others there was royal lion in abundance as benefits royal bounty the drinking was not according to any fixed rule for the King had ordered the stewards to serve each man what he wanted also Vashti the Queen gave a banquet for the women in the royal house belonging to King a hush hush on the seventh day when the king was in high spirits from the wine he ordered a Oman Vista harbona bita avatar is a tar and carcass the seven officers who attended him to bring Queen Vashti before the king with the Royal Crown in order to show the people and the officials her beauty or she was indeed a good-looking woman but Queen Vashti refused to come at the order of the King which he had sent through his officers this enraged the King his anger blazed inside as was the Kings custom he consulted sages well-versed in matters of law and justice with him were-car sneh sitar odd mata Tarshish mer s marce na and mimic on the seven vice Regents of Persian media who were part of the Kings inner circle and were the most important officials in the kingdom the King asked the sages according to the law what should we do to queen vashti vashti since she didn't obey the order of King a hush faroush conveyed by his officers may makan presented the king and vice regions this answer Vashti the Queen has not as wrong not only the king but also all the officials all the peoples and all the known provinces of King a hush faroush because of this act of the Queen's will because because of this act of the Queen's will become known to all women who will then start showing disrespect towards their own husbands and they all say King Ahaz Faraj ordered Vashti the Queen to be bought before him but she wouldn't come moreover the noble ladies of Persian media who hear of the Queen's conduct will mention it to all the king's officials which will bring about no end of disrespect in dis court if it pleases His Majesty let him issue a royal decree let it be written as one of the laws of the Persians and the Medes which are irrevocable that Vashti is never again to be admitted into the presence of King a hush-hush and that the King give her royal position to someone better than she and when the Edict made by the king is proclaimed throughout the length and the breadth of the kingdom then all wise will honor their husbands where their greater small this advice please the king of the officials so the king did what memo Khan had suggested he sent letters to all the royal provinces to each province in its own script to each people in its own language that every man should be master in his own house and speak the language of his own people depending on which Bible version you are using you might be saying wait a minute what happened to the rest of these verses you seem to have skipped some if your Bible is taken from the Greek Septuagint then chapter one is about fifty percent longer than if your Bibles taken from the Hebrew if you're reading from the complete Jewish Bible as I just did then it's taken from the Hebrew Masoretic text of about 1000 ad now we discussed last week the reason for the differences between the two versions and why we can only speculate it's a pretty reasonable speculation that it is because without the additions it was felt there was nothing religious about the story of Esther at all in fact the mention of God is entirely missing the result of the startling fact is that early rabbis debated over whether the book of Esther even belonged as part of the Holy Scriptures it seems that the additions to the Greek versions of Esther satisfied most of them sufficiently enough to accept the book is worthy of being part of the Hebrew Bible so let's stop right here and I'm gonna read to you the additions made to chapter 1 essentially these Greek editions are read to you replace verse one of the Hebrew version in other words this entire Edition belongs at the beginning of the chapter from verse to forward the Greek versions and the Hebrew versions are nearly identical so here is the addition in the Greek to chapter one I want to read this from the New Jerusalem Bible in the second year of the reign of the great king I swear on the first day of Nisan a dream came to Mordecai son of Jair son of Shem a son of Kish of the tribe of Benjamin a Jew living at Sousa and holding a high office at the Royal Court he was one of the captives whom Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had deported from Jerusalem with jock nya king of Judah this was his dream there were cries and noise thunder and earthquakes and disorder over the whole earth then two great dragons came forward each ready for the fray and set up a great roar at the sound of them every nation made ready to wage war against the nation of the just a day of darkness and gloom of affliction distress oppression great disturbance on earth the righteous nation was thrown into consternation at the fear of the evils that were awaiting them and they prepared for death crying out to God then from their cry is from a little spring there grew a great river a flood of water mmm light came as the Sun rose and the humble were raised up and they devoured the mighty on awakening from this dream and vision of God's designs Mordecai thought deeply on the matter trying his best all day to discover what his meaning might be lodging at court with big town and teresh two of the king's eunuchs who guarded the palace mordecai got wind of their intentions and uncovered their plot and learning that they were preparing to assassinate King us whereas he warned the King against them and the king gave orders for the two eunuchs to be tortured they confessed and they were executed the King then had these events recorded in his Chronicles while Mordecai himself also wrote an account of them the king then appointed Mordecai to an office at court and rewarded him with high with presents but Haman son of Hama daata the Agra guy who enjoyed high favor with the king determined to injure Mordecai in revenge for the Kings to eunuchs whoops so there's the addition now the early church treated these additions differently depending on the decision of the bishops that were in charge the various regional groups of congregations some of them accepted the additions in their entirety and so they included them in the Bible others discarded them entirely and accepted them only as part of the several books of the Apocrypha Saint Jerome made them like an appendix at the end of the book of Esther and here in the Jerusalem Bible the additions are placed like they are in this the Greek Septuagint but they're written in italics so that the reader knows that these verses are disputed and can make a personal decision about how we ought to handle them my approach to this issue is this I shall read from the Hebrew first next I'll alert you and then read the Greek editions as they were placed in the Septuagint we might talk about these briefly it depends on the situation personally I find no good reason to accept them as authentic and but rather have every reason to see them as misguided as a misguided attempt to add to the scriptures even if the motive might have been a good one well the opening of this chapter gives us a time place and it gives us the name of the king at the center of the Esther story the time we're told is the third year of the Kings reign and even though the Greek Edition pinpoints a date to the first day of Nisan the first month of the Hebrew religious calendar I don't think we can rely on it although it's not impossible the sense this king was known to rain from 486 BC to 465 BC this story would necessarily then have to be placed about 484 BC however it must be stated that it is very difficult and tricky to align the reigns of these various Kings according to our modern calendar systems no Bible era culture right on through the New Testament would have spoken in terms of AD or BC there was no Universal calendar in those days rather it says though the calendar was reset upon each new King seceding through the throne literally in the year a middle-eastern king was coronated it became year one in his kingdom other kingdoms did the same thing so each independent kingdom had its own reckoning of what year it was so when we're told it's in the third year of so-and-so's reign if the people of that King's Kingdom had a calendar hanging up on their walls of course there was no such thing that make-believe calendar would have said the year was three but when a new king was crowned the calendar would revert to one now the place of our story of Esther is in Sousa in Hebrew it's called Shushan now this was originally the capital of the kingdom of a law but it had long since been destroyed the new Sousa was a magnificent city actually history records that there were four capital cities of the new Persian Empire operating all at the same time Sousa epoch Cana Babylon and Persepolis but calling them all capitals is misleading Sousa was the administrative center of the Empire it's the equivalent of of London or Moscow or Washington DC the other three cities mentioned are where there were royal palaces that the king would have used for various reasons sometimes moving just to enjoy the seasons having four palaces was appropriate for a king of an empire of such an enormous size as Persia as it demonstrated his wide-ranging authority and his wealth but Sousa was his primary residence and it was the official capital of the media Persian Empire now our King is called a swears in Persian Xerxes in Greek a hush-hush in Hebrew these are all vocalizations in three different languages of the same name and depending on your Bible version one of these we'll be what you read yet some versions might say that this king is not Xerxes it's artaxerxes these indeed are two different people our desert seas is Xerxes Sun and by saying esters king is artaxerxes it is that Bible editors attempt to place the time of our story about 40 years later and this has been mostly discredited so Esther takes place entirely within the confines of the capital city of Persia which is Susa the king of our story is Xerxes and for the sake of simplicity we'll say that the time is around 480 BC Xerxes was the son of Darius the first this is not the same Darius Darya vish of the Book of Daniel who was a Meade now while archaeology has not proved it it seems that the Darius of Daniel who was a Meade essentially was a lesser king who ruled under the higher authority of Cyrus who was a Persian in time Darius lost his position Cyrus became the sole king of the Persian Empire now as the symbolism of one of Daniels visions accurately portrayed by the portrays rather the median Persian Empire as a ram with two horns if you'll recall the horns were of two different sizes one noticeably larger than the other which indicates one is more powerful than the other and indeed that was the case the kingdom of Persia was more powerful than the kingdom of media and although these two kingdoms were strong allies due to long-standing royalty family ties nonetheless it was only a matter of time before the bigger horn flexed its muscles so it seems as though Darius the Mede was given the position as the king of the former Babylonian Empire so he operated out of Babylon as a happy political accommodation that was instituted immediately following the fall of Babylon but in a few years this arrangement had served his purpose to recognize the honor and the friendship and the achievements of the Medes and now Cyrus the Persian simply abolished this intermediate office and he became the sole King over a United Persian Empire so again for the sake of simplicity Cyrus was the first Persian King canvases followed him then Darius the first then Xerxes the king of our story it was Darius the first who built the fabulous Palace of Susa that his son Xerxes now occupied now since it's going to be important to our story I'll tell you now that Darius the first had built an amazingly modern postal system the Persian government administration relied on rapid communications as the Persian Empire was so fast it was so culturally diverse he thought and wisely so that accurate and efficient communication between the central government and its many provinces and districts that was the key to successful governing into defense of his empire this was accomplished by a network of roads that all eventually led to Sousa ancient records show for example that there were 111 relay posts on the road between Souza and Sardis so one can only imagine there had to be a few thousand postal relay stations in all in this vast communication networks of the Persian Empire how large was this rather young Empire verse set a verse one says it consisted of 127 provinces that ranged from India in the East to Ethiopia in the West and South but let's be clear this is not referring to the India that we know today the reference is really in the scriptures to the Indus meaning the Indus River and it's actually speaking of what weeds they call Pakistan as for Ethiopia the modern Ethiopia is not exactly the same as the ancient one the ancient one is today what we would call the northern Sudan further using the term provinces gives us kind of a false picture the Hebrew word is made in not and modern terms probably the word district is a better choice think in terms of counties or parishes so the hundred and twenty seven Medina or smallish districts that at one time had been independent kingdoms or or small city-states so they each had somewhat identifiably different languages or or variant dialects and of course different customs and traditions verse three says that King Xerxes threw a banquet for all of his government's officials and that he showed off his amazing wealth for a hundred and eighty days now as I mentioned in last week's introduction this is often discounted as untrue because it's unthinkable that anyone could hold a hundred and eighty day long banquet but that's not what it says and that's not what it implies rather there was a banquet the text seems to imply to banquets one at the start of the festival one that brings it to a close that was associated with his 180 day festival and it was done for the purpose of exert of xerxes letting his subjects view view the wealth and power that he helped now what might have precipitated the decision to do this well while it again it's speculative we can pretty firmly connect the time period of this banquet to Persia's attack of the greeks that is it seems that it was probably about two years from the date of this hundred and eighty day festival that persia sent a large expeditionary force to conquer Macedonia and the surrounding territories Persia was repelled by the Greeks by the way and then a second attempt perhaps eighteen months later wound up in a terrible loss for Xerxes so a number of astute scholars point out that this feast was no doubt a way for Xerxes to muster support of all of his government officials of his far-flung Empire for a war of conquest that was mostly just the dream of this pampered and bored King after all in Persia life was good things were generally peaceful there was widespread prosperity in the kingdom why would anybody want to go to war for more land thus the King hoped that by showing off his wealth and his awesome resources these government officials would lose their reluctance and back his plan and see this proposed war with Greece as an assured victory that would only add to the wealth and prosperity of his empire well the next several verses elaborate on these festivities and it speaks of marble columns and mosaic flooring and couches to recline while eating we're curtains made of the finest linen much use of the most expensive colors there were to manufacture blue and purple goblets made of gold were used and they were all different the royal wine meaning the finest wine was used to ply the guests verse eight explains that the guests didn't have to follow the usual Persian protocol of drinking proportionally to the king that is there was a rule and Persian a dot it dot that the King determined how much people were to drink and however much he drank they were to follow his lead and as the story unfolds we find that Dirk C's was a lush and he seemed to be intoxicated as much and as often as possible this passage has caused Bible scholars some interpretation problems become because on the one hand we hear that the Persian law a dot is irrevocable and on the other hand the king revoked the law about how much wine these festival guests were obligated to drink but common sense and some reading of other Persian documents makes it self-evident that the Persian term dot can indicate a law a regulation a tradition even just a custom so apparently it was a Persian custom for everyone to follow the Kings lead and drinking as opposed to a firm law that might actually get one arrested and prosecuted if he wasn't drunk enough and so since many ethnic groups were represented at this this festival and since the purpose was for PR and for schmoozing the guests the king relaxed the custom and he made it clear that there would be no breach of protocol or offence taken if a person chose to drink more or less than the king well verse nine explains that the Queen the King's wife Queen Vashti held a banquet for the women now these women would have been the wives perhaps the escorts of the various government officials now would be a good time to explain something that will very shortly have some significant bearing on this story the Middle East of course has always been a highly male-dominated society but it is manifested in varying degrees from society society and aged age the Persian society in this era was among the more extreme men partied and drank by themselves away from the women women live very separate lives from their husbands depending on one's level in society at the highest levels the Royal and the aristocrat level it seems that the separation was the greatest some of it was male chauvinism and domination but some of it also concerned the great degree of modesty that was required of females so it was considered terribly inappropriate immodest for the women to be around the men who were drinking in fact this was actually cemented in Persian law now since essentially this hundred and eighty day festival had as its highlight an unlimited supply of the King's Own wine stores drunkenness was the daily mode of most of these officials thus Vashti had to entertain the wives and girlfriends of these officials from the hundred and twenty seven provinces but verse 10 explains that on the final day the seventh day of the banquet the seven-day banquet spoken of in verse five after months of being drunk and disorderly the inebriated king decided he wanted his most honored male guests to view his beautiful wife so he ordered that she come to him immediately he had seven royal courtiers close advisers to go and fetch his wife she was to wear her royal crown but she refused and in the text were not given the reason for her refusal so as we can imagine all sorts of opinions of arisen as to why this was one tradition is that she was being required to appear naked before the king and his male guests and it's the rabbis who came up with this one they said that because it says she's to wear the royal crowns what were to take that to me is a rent world crown what would take that to meanness that's all she was to wear however because the rabbi's have always painted the government officials of the for Gentile world empires as louts and barbarians this is the reason for their assumption of nakedness that is in no reasonable way applied in these passages some scholars paint her is just an arrogant arrogant queen who thought she could use her own power as royalty and that she mistakenly also thought she had the right of her own prerogative to go or not go however I think this had much more to do with the issue we just discussed it was Persian law that a woman could not be in the presence of men who were drunk or drinking to do so offended a woman's modesty thus bringing shame upon her and it violated exclusive male territory thus infuriating the male ego so she was caught in a catch-22 no matter her decision she was in a no-win situation all because her drunken husband and his associates were behaving irrationally like you do when you're drunk no matter her firm stance on this situation left this King in a bad spot he had made his boast in front of his whole royal court he couldn't have his wife humiliate him in such a way so he calls upon his seven other men called wise men to help him decide what Persian law dictated that he should do in response verse 13 and our complete Jewish Bible says that these men will were well versed in law injustice that's not a correct translation rather the passage says that he consulted with wise men who knew the times and it was these who were the experts in Persian law the Hebrew word used for the times is 8 and it means time just as we think of time today the Hebrew word calm means wise or wise men in those days the intellectuals of the Babylonian and then the Persian empires were well versed in astrology and in divination time was a mysterious thing to them and that's one reason that calendars were devised and kept by these same wise men the same calm when Yeshua was born we hear in Matthew 2 of the wise men coming from the east following a star Matthew 2:1 after Yeshua was born in Bethlehem in Bethlehem in the land of Judah during the time when Herod was king wise men from the east came to Jerusalem and asked where is the newborn king the Jews for we saw his star in the east and we've come to worship Him these men were very similar in profession to the ones we see attending to the king in our Esther story but I'd like you to take note over the series of sevens that we've just encountered the seven-day banquet the issue of the king calling for Queen Vashti on the seventh day of the seven-day banquet and this giant Fuhrer it all erupted it in to the king ordering seven of his advisers to go and tell the Queen to appear before the king and now a different group of seven wise men are consulted when Queen Vashti refuses to comply point being that as we've learned in our past studies when we start seeing the number seven appear in the Bible this helps us to know that God is directly involved in this situation and that his sovereign will is being brought about even though it may be happening undetected by humans some scholars say that this isn't the case because it's just it's a secular setting in a foreign country and that it's a Persian problem of a Persian king that's being dealt with I say that this is really the story of Hebrews being rescued by a Hebrew man Mordecai and his Hebrew female relative Esther and no doubt the story is being told by a Hebrew storyteller in the Hebrew language a story meant for the Hebrews to enjoy thus the series of sevens would be a signal to the Jews and it gives Esther a Jewish religious context that it it that is perhaps not so missing after all and we don't need all those dubious Greek additions to discover it now there's an important context for us to grasp in order to understand the Kings self-made dilemma and his wise men's challenge in trying to deal with it the king was in a pickle because he was drunk not thinking straight he issued an unbelievably disrespectful and inappropriate order to his beautiful queen who was just over there minding our own business to come and display herself to his guests as though she was his prized heifer and while modern western women reading and listening will probably automatic seat automatically see this through a somewhat feminist lens that's not my intent and that's not the intent of the story this disrespect on display was a middle-eastern type of disrespect and it involved a modesty and dishonor this is not about a woman standing up to a man a woman in that setting would rather literally die then live in a such a state of shame that would result from this for the rest of her life and the King had painted himself in a corner because he can't just say oh I was drunk I didn't mean it Kings never make mistakes besides the king was always drunk Kings were considered godlike in their wisdom and so a decision was made in an alcoholic stupor and it was considered every bit his thought-out invalid as one made stone sober further he would be seen as weak and foolish humbled by a mere woman if he didn't do something drastic to deal with his wife's disobedience because he had made this decree claim so the king did what Kings do he delegated the problem he laid it before his wise men to find a solution and mimicked on quickly proved his worth and demonstrated why he deserved to be in the King's inner circle mimicked on cleverly changed the context of the issue to take the heat off the King he quickly broadened the issue of one from a single Queen being disobedient to her all-powerful husband to one that affected not only the members of the royal court but virtually every husband and wife in the entire empire after all everyone present who heard the Kings demands for his wife to come to him were males but if we kind of back away and we look at this from a 30,000 foot view point what was really happening is that a mountain has been made from a molehill is there really grave danger to the marriages of every family in the Empire because Queen Vashti refused to appear in front of a roomful of drunken men his modesty and protocol would have her do regardless of the consequences honestly the notion is absurd all the wives in the kingdom are now going to hear this and begin to rebel and show disrespect to their husbands to because of this this is really a bit of comedy that's intended yet it also shows just how self-absorbed these Royals are so detached from reality so ready to dispose of even the Queen if it keeps them from admitting the King's air or exposing the vanity well the law crazy Persian government decided that the only solution to the law that theoretically was at the bottom of this de lemon was enact another law sounds familiar and this new law was that Vashti could never again be in the presence of her husband what it really is is a writ of divorce in fact to make the point up to now every mention of Vashti included the word Queen from here forward the title queen is no more spoken as a prefix to her name she's just Mashti some rabbis said she was executed there's no evidence of that but she was kicked out of the harem we really don't know what became of her well verse 19 brings up the issue that any law approved by the king is irrevocable and as we encounter later we find that this means that the king can even overturn his own law now some scholars say they find this to be nonsense that a kingdom let alone an empire couldn't possibly be ruled in such a manner but that's only another example of nothing but an opinion that's being held up as fact the only evidence we have in documents is that indeed that's exactly how it was mighty King have found a way to essentially annul one law with inventing a new one certainly just watch the operation of the parliaments in our Congress it's done everyday verse 21 says the king was most pleased with this brilliant solution he was off the hook and it made him look like he was mainly concerned with social fabric of Persia that it not be sullied or porn in case women might actually think they could bake brazenly disobey their husbands what a guy the wise men especially mimic Khan appeared to validate their title and so in verse 22 the decree to banish Vashti was piggybacked upon a law that said that wives should honor their husbands no matter their social status letters were sent to each Medina each of the hundred and twenty-seven districts and they were sent we're told in their own alphabet and in their own ethnic language this brings us back to that amazing postal system that must have included scribes that represented every known language of the Empire because this won't be the final time that we hear of its use to send decrees of the King throughout the Persian Empire in all the languages present in his empire and at the end of this verse we get this interesting comment that every man should be the master of his own house and speak the language of his own people there's been a lot of academic discussion about what's intended by this statement but I agree with the majority of scholars to use modern terms Persia was culturally diverse and multi-ethnic which meant they were multilingual intermarriage among ethnic groups was usual it was customary the diversity was quite welcome in the Persian Empire and we have found an inscription on a tablet written by Xerxes that says this I am Xerxes the great king the King of Kings the king of all countries which speak all kinds of languages the more usual practice for an expanding Kingdom or Empire especially for an empire was to demand that all conquered people learned to speak the language of the King and then the royal documents and decrees oral and written were distributed in that language and it was the duty of the Empire's multi-ethnic citizens to understand it until very modern times this was the custom in the USA this tolerance for various languages and Persian culture stands in sharp contrast to the attitude of Greek culture Greek writings show that one of the several things that they held against the Persians was the stupidity in their estimation of allowing scores of languages to exist in their empire even writing the king's decrees in many languages for the sake of its diverse citizenry so the idea of this statement that ends chapter 1 is that it combines the issues of language with a man being the master in his own home and naturally the context is that this goes hand-in-hand with the new law about female showing proper respect to their husbands thus the laws intended effect was that if a wife came from a different ethnic culture and language than her husband there was only to be one language spoken one culture practiced in every household guess which one the native language and culture of the husband now if we can put ourselves in the position of a Jewish person 2,000 years ago reading this story we would probably be rolling on the floor and laughter right about now I mean look at this silly set of circumstances that have evolved from these pagan Gentiles who are supposedly the superior mass of the domain silly rulings which now affects every household in the Persian Empire all stemming from nothing more than a single instance of a queen refusing her inebriated husband's demand to come and show herself to his drinking buddies will begin Esther chapter 2 next week please rise [Music] yes [Music]

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

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Length: 52min 50sec (3170 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2019