There have been many movies and books made about Esther. The most popular may be 'One Night With the King', which I saw when I was younger.
It portrays Esther as a beautiful twenty-something-year-old woman, who falls in love with a young and handsome King Ahasuerus/Xerxes. As I remember from last time I saw it, he doesn't want his concubines anymore, just Esther.
That movie bothered me back then, and I was thinking about it again today, and decided to write a blog post about it!
The story of Esther is NOT romantic.
A prequel to the story is that the Israelites were taken captive to Babylon, and then granted freedom. By the time of Esther some of them had returned to Jerusalem, but many of them decided to stay in Babylon rather than return to Israel, God's home for them.
The story of Esther starts of with Vashti, the Queen, refusing to go before the King's drunken party to 'show off' her beauty. The King is so angry that he removes her from her position - to be disgraced and exiled at best, or killed at worst, we are only told "that Vashti come no more before king Ahasuerus; and let the king give her royal estate unto another that is better than she."
She is often portrayed as the "bad one" in the situation. She was a pagan Queen, who most likely knew little of God, but I think that she was brave and right to refuse the King.
So, not a very romantic start to the story. Let's keep going.
The King decides to find a new wife of the young virgins of the country. Esther is brought to the royal grounds to be prepared.
With some research I have found that Esther was probably fifteen years old. She was an orphan, and raised by her Uncle Mordecai who seemed to know that she was going to be taken - he advised her not to let anyone know she was a Jew.
So she was taken to the palace against her own will, a Jew surrounded by Babylonian practices and religious rituals. She was under constant danger of being found out.
The King would have been around forty years old when he married Esther. He no doubt had many concubines already.
I can't even imagine how incredibly hard that would have been for Esther. A fifteen-year Jewish girl old forced to marry a middle-aged, pagan King. Away from her family, amid a political scene where people were attempting to assassinate the king, and she was in great danger personally.
In Esther 2:12-14 it is described how each of the young girls were taken to the King, where he slept with them, and then sent them to live with the concubines. They would spend the rest of their lives living in a harem unless the King liked her and would call her to come back to him.
For Esther it was no different, except that he found her the most beautiful, and she was made the Queen. It is recorded that he "loved her above all the women," and as is shown later in the story he must have cared for her. But that doesn't change the situation or Esther's experience. After sleeping with countless women and sending them to his house of concubines, even if he really did love Esther, she was still a fifteen or sixteen-year-old girl who had been taken against her will to the palace, could very well have ended up living the rest of her life in a harem, and who had to hide her identity to protect herself.
It was not romantic. It was not a great love story. Esther probably did not want to be there.
That makes it all the more amazing. God used this awful situation to bring about good and save many lives. Joseph being betrayed by his brothers, sold into slavery, falsely accused, and thrown into prison was a horrible situation but God used it to save many people, He also used the awful situation Esther was in to save many people.
When she was around twenty, she found out about the plot of Haman to kill the Jews, and decided to go before the King. She had not seen him for thirty days. She knew the gravity of the situation, and that to go before him without permission would most likely mean to lose her life, and to not go would mean the same. That is why she prayed and fasted for three days, with all her handmaidens and the Jews in Babylon.
She went before the King, and he extended favour to her. God's hand was in that. And her people were spared.
If you want a romantic story go read Cinderella. Not Esther.
If you want a story of how God can use an awful situation to bring about good, and a courageous young woman who was brave enough to obey Him, read Esther!
Footnote: this is an interesting article about Esther if you'd like to read more.
