Esther 2:5-11
She had not showed her people
Taken into the house of the women, she is given what is appointed and asks for nothing beyond it. Mordecai walks every day before the court to learn how she does.
People of the Bible
Esther
Kept her nationality secret for five years, and then spent it all in one sentence.
Also called Hadassah
Esther is an orphan raised by her cousin in Susa, taken into the king’s house in a search for a new queen, and told by Mordecai not to say what people she is from. She wins the position. Four years later a decree is published for the killing of every Jew in a hundred and twenty-seven provinces on a single day, and she learns of it through messengers going back and forth from a man in sackcloth at the gate who will not come in. Her first answer is that nobody may approach the king uncalled.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Esther
- 01
- 02
Esther 4:10-14
For such a time as this
She sends word about the inner court and the golden sceptre and thirty days uncalled. The reply names the risk to her and then removes her from the centre of it: deliverance will arise from another place.
- 03
Esther 4:15-17
If I perish, I perish
Three days of fasting, night and day, by her and her maids and every Jew in Susa. Then she will go in to the king, which is not according to the law.
- 04
Esther 5:1-8
The second banquet
She stands in the inner court in royal apparel and the sceptre is held out. Offered half the kingdom, she asks only for a dinner, and at the dinner she asks for another.
- 05
Esther 7:1-6
The adversary is this wicked Haman
On the second day she asks for her own life and the life of her people, says they have been sold to be destroyed, and names the man sitting at the table.
Why it matters
The book never once names God, which is either its weakness or its whole point, and the argument Mordecai makes turns on that silence: if you hold your peace, deliverance will arise from another place, and who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this. She answers by ordering a fast, and then by going in against the law with the sentence the book is remembered for: if I perish, I perish. What follows is three days, two banquets, and a reversal.
12 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
