'And Esther spake yet again before the king, and fell down at his
feet, and besought him with tears to put away the mischief of Haman
the Agagite, and his device that he had devised against the Jews. 4.
Then the king held out the golden sceptre toward Esther. So Esther
arose, and stood before the king, 5. And said, If it please the king,
and if I have found favour in his sight, and the thing seem right
before the king, and I be pleasing in his eyes, let it be written to
reverse the letters devised by Haman the son of Hammedatha the
Agagite, which he wrote to destroy the Jews which are in all the
king's provinces: 6. For how can I endure to see the evil that shall
come unto my people? or how can I endure to see the destruction of my
kindred? 7. Then the king Ahasuerus said unto Esther the queen, and to
Mordecai the Jew, Behold, I have given Esther the house of Haman, and
him they have hanged upon the gallows, because he laid his hand upon
the Jews. 8. Write ye also for the Jews, as it liketh you, in the
king's name, and seal it with the king's ring: for the writing which
is written in the king's name, and sealed with the king's ring, may no
man reverse. 15. And Mordecai went out from the presence of the king
in royal apparel of blue and white, and with a great crown of gold,
and with a garment of fine linen and purple: and the city of Shushan
rejoiced and was glad. 16. The Jews had light, and gladness, and joy,
and honour. 17. And in every province, and in every city,
whithersoever the king's commandment and his decree came, the Jews had
joy and gladness, a feast and a good day. And many of the people of
the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon
them.'--ESTHER viii. 3-8,15-17.
The spirit of this passage may perhaps be best caught by taking the
three persons appearing in it, and the One who does not appear, but
acts unseen through them all.
I. The heroine of the whole book and of this chapter is Esther, one of
the sweetest and noblest of the women of Scripture. 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. She took her life in her hand when she sought an
audience of Ahasuerus uninvited, and she knew that she did. Nothing in
literature is nobler than her quiet words, which measure her danger
without shrinking, and front it without heroics: 'If I perish, I
perish!'
The danger was not past, though she was queen and beloved; for a
despot's love is a shifting sand-bank, which may yield anchorage
to-day, and to-morrow may be washed away. So she counted not her life
dear unto herself when, for the second time, as in our passage, she
ventured, uninvited, into the king's presence. The womanly courage
that risks life for love's sake is nobler than the soldier's that
feels the lust of battle maddening him.
Esther's words to the king are full of tact. She begins with what
seems to have been the form of address prescribed by custom, for it is
used by her in her former requests (chap. v. 8; vii. 3). But she adds
a variation of the formula, tinged with more personal reference to the
king's feeling towards her, as well as breathing entire submission to
his estimate of what was fitting. 'If the thing seem right before the
king,' appeals to the sense of justice that lay dormant beneath the
monarch's arbitrary will; 'and I be pleasing in his eyes,' drew him by
the charm of her beauty. She avoided making the king responsible for
the plot, and laid it at the door of the dead and discredited Haman.
It was his device, and since he had fallen, his policy could be
reversed without hurting the king's dignity. And then with fine tact,
as well as with a burst of genuine feeling, she flings all her
personal influence into the scale, and seeks to move the king, not by
appeals to his justice or royal duty, but to his love for her, which
surely could not bear to see her suffer. One may say that it was a low
motive to appeal to, to ask the despot to save a people in order to
keep one woman from sorrow; and so it was. It was Ahasuerus's fault
that such a reason had more weight with him than nobler ones. It was
not Esther's that she used her power over him to carry her point. She
used the weapons that she had, and that she knew would be efficacious.
The purpose for which she used them is her justification.
Esther may well teach her sisters to-day to be brave and gentle, to
use their influence over men for high purposes of public good, to be
the inspirers of their husbands, lovers, brothers, for all noble
thinking and doing; to make the cause of the oppressed their own, to
be the apostles of mercy and the hinderers of wrong, to keep true to
their early associations if prosperity comes to them, and to cherish
sympathy with their nation so deep that they cannot 'endure to see the
evil that shall come unto them' without using all their womanly
influence to avert it.
II. Ahasuerus plays a sorry part beside Esther. He knows no law but
his own will, and that is moved, not by conscience or reason, but by
ignoble passions and sensual desires. He tosses his subjects' lives as
trivial gifts to any who ask for them. Haman's wife knew that he had
only to 'speak to the king,' and Mordecai would be hanged; Haman had
no difficulty in securing the royal mandate for the murder of all the
Jews. Sated with the indulgence of low desires, he let all power slip
from his idle hands, and his manhood was rotted away by wallowing in
the pigsty of voluptuousness. But he was tenacious of the semblance of
authority, and demanded the appearance of abject submission from the
'servants' who were his masters. He yielded to Esther's prayer as
lightly as to Haman's plot. Whether the Jews were wiped out or not
mattered nothing to him, so long as he had no trouble in the affair.
To shift all responsibility off his own shoulders on to somebody
else's was his one aim. He was as untrue to his duty when he gave his
signet to Mordecai, and bade him and Esther do as they liked, as when
he had given it to Haman. And with all this slothful indifference to
his duty, he was sensitive to etiquette, and its cobwebs held him whom
the cords of his royal obligations could not hold. It mattered not to
him that the edict which he allowed Mordecai to promulgate practically
lit the flames of civil war. He had washed his hands of the whole
business.
It is a hideous picture of an Eastern despot, and has been said to be
unhistorical and unbelievable. But the world has seen many examples of
rulers whom the possession of unlimited and irresponsible power has
corrupted in like fashion. And others than rulers may take the warning
that to live to self is the mother of all sins and crimes; that no man
can safely make his own will and his own passions his guides; that
there is no slavery so abject as that of the man who is tyrannised by
his lower nature; that there is a temptation besetting us all to take
the advantages and neglect the duties of our position, and that to
yield to it is sure to end in moral ruin. We are all kings, even if
our kingdom be only our own selves, and we shall rule wisely only if
we rule as God's viceroys, and think more of duty than of delight.
III. Mordecai is a kind of duplicate of Joseph, and embodies valuable
lessons. Contented acceptance of obscurity and neglect of his
services, faithfulness to his people and his God in the foul
atmosphere of such a court, wise reticence, patient discharge of small
duties, undoubting hope when things looked blackest fed by stedfast
faith in God, unchangedness of character and purpose when lifted to
supreme dignity, the use of influence and place, not for himself, but
for his people,--all these are traits which may be imitated in any
life. We should be the same men, whether we sit unnoticed among the
lackeys at the gate, or are bearing the brunt of the hatred of
powerful foes, or are clothed 'in royal apparel of blue and white, and
with a great crown of gold.' These gauds were nothing to Mordecai, and
earthly honours should never turn our heads. He valued power because
it enabled him to save his brethren, and we should cultivate the same
spirit. The political world, with its fierce struggles for personal
ends, its often disregard of the public good, and its use of place and
power for 'making a pile' or helping relations up, would be much the
better for some infusion of the spirit of Mordecai.
IV. But we must not look only at the visible persons and forces. This
book of Esther does not say much about God, but His presence broods
over it all, and is the real spring that moves the movers that are
seen. It is all a lesson of how God works out His purposes through men
that seem to themselves to be working out theirs. The king's criminal
abandonment to lust and luxury, Haman's meanly personal pique,
Esther's beauty, the fall of the favourite, the long past services of
Mordecai, even the king's sleepless night, are all threads in the web,
and God is the weaver. The story raises the whole question of the
standing miracle of the co-existence and co-operation of the divine
and the human. Man is free and responsible, God is sovereign and
all-pervading. He 'makes the wrath of man to praise Him, and with the
remainder thereof He girdeth Himself.' To-day, as then, He is working
out His deep designs through men whom He has raised up, though they
have not known Him. Amid the clash of contending interests and worldly
passions His solemn purpose steadily advances to its end, like the
irresistible ocean current, which persists through all storms that
agitate the surface, and draws them into the drift of its silent
trend. Ahasuerus, Haman, Esther, Mordecai, are His instruments, and
yet each of them is the doer of his or her deed, and has to answer to
Him for it.