1. Ahasuerus was King of Persia, and he made a great feast in order to show his riches to the nobles and princes of provinces, and his queen, Vashti, made a feast for the women. When the feast had lasted a week, and the king was drunken with wine, he gave orders that the queen should be brought before him that his guests might admire her beauty. Vashti refused to submit to such indignity. This made the king angry, and eventually, lest her audacity should be followed by other women, the king deposed her, as an example. Then the fair young virgins of the land were gathered together to Shushan the palace, that Ahasuerus might, in despotic Oriental fashion, choose one of them as his queen instead of Vashti. The king chose Esther (or Hadassah, as she was called by her Hebrew countrymen). She obtained grace and favour in his sight. He placed the royal crown upon her head, and she dwelt in royal state.
2. And yet Esther was a Jewess-a woman of a conquered race, whose people were of the Captivity, and therefore despised and hated. This the king did not know, for Esther had not disclosed the fact that she was a Jewess, because Mordecai had charged her not to show her kindred or her people, and she obeyed him as she did when she lived in his house, and was as a daughter to him. For the beauty of Esther's character is this, that she was not spoiled by her great elevation. To be the one favourite out of all the select maidens of the kingdom, and to know that she owed her privileged position solely to the king's fancy for her personal charms, might have spoilt the grace of a simple Jewess. Haman was ruined by his honours becoming too great for his self-control. But in Esther we do not light on a trace of the silly vanity that became the most marked characteristic of the grand vizier. It speaks well for Mordecai's sound training of the orphan girl that his ward proved to be of stable character where a weaker person would have been dizzy with selfish elation.
There was a freedom enjoyed by the women of Israel that was not allowed in the more elaborate civilization of the great empires of the East, and this developed an independent spirit and a vigour not usually seen in Oriental women. In the case of Esther these good qualities were able to survive the external restraints and the internal relaxing atmosphere of her court life. The orphan girl who had grown up into beauty under the care of her uncle Mordecai, and was lifted suddenly from sheltered obscurity into the “fierce light that beats upon a throne,” like some flower culled in a shady nook and set in a king's bosom, was true to her childhood's protector and to her people, and kept her sweet, brave gentleness unspoiled by the rapid elevation which ruins so many characters. Her Jewish name of Hadassah (“myrtle”) well befits her, for she is clothed with unostentatious beauty, pure and fragrant as the blossoms that brides twine in their hair. But, withal, she has a true woman's courage which is always ready to endure any evil and dare any danger at the bidding of her heart.
Esther is a heroine-capable, energetic, brave, and patriotic. The splendour of her career is seen in this very fact, that she does not succumb to the luxury of her surroundings. The royal harem among the lily-beds of Shushan is like a palace in the land of the lotus-eaters, “where it is always afternoon”; and its inmates, in their dreamy indolence, are tempted to forget all obligations and interests beyond the obligation to please the king and their own interest in securing every comfort wealth can lavish on them. We do not look for a Boadicea in such a hot-house of narcotics. And when we find there a strong unselfish woman such as Esther, conquering almost insuperable temptations to a life of ease, and choosing a course of terrible danger to herself for the sake of her oppressed people, we can echo the admiration of the Jews for their national heroine.1 [Note: W. F. Adeney, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, 383.]
