The “after these things” is actually not referring to the party or the displacement of Vashti, it is referring to his war with Greece. Now, Xerxes lost this war pretty badly. In fact, this war was the moment when world power would shift from the East with the likes of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and, of course, the Medo-Persian Empire to the West with Greece and later the great Roman Empire. This war was an incredibly pivotal moment in the history of the world… and Xerxes lost.
Xerxes has come home, licking his wounds, from an embarrassing defeat when he remembers what he had done to Vashti. Xerxes becomes lonely because he realizes that he not longer has a queen. His advisors tell him that he needs to find a wife in the most spiritual and efficient way possible… I’m just kidding, they tell him to hold a beauty pageant and have him marry the girl that he thinks is the prettiest.
Enter our two “heroes”- Mordecai and Esther. There are a few things we see about both of these people from the very start, and it isn’t very flattering. First, both Mordecai and Esther were living under their non-Jewish names. Mordecai was a Babylonian name, it meant “follower of Marduck” who was a Babylonian idol. Esther’s Hebrew name was Hadassah but she went by the name Esther. From the beginning, we see that Mordecai and Esther were hiding their identity. This was wrong for them to do and there was no reason for it. There had been people high in government positions who had been openly Jewish before (Daniel, Nehemiah, Shadrach Meschach, and Abednego to name a few!). Jewish folks were treated just like everyone else, in fact, they had gotten favor from the former King Cyrus! It was unnecessary to hide their identity and it was also a denial of who their God was. Their Jewish heritage was so closely associated with the worship of Jehovah, to deny their heritage was to also deny their God.
Mordecai should not have even been there. By now Cyrus had allowed the Jewish people to go back home. But sadly there were a lot of folks who had gotten very comfortable in their Persian lives and stayed behind, rather than going back to the land of promise.
Next week we will more closely examine why Esther was not completely heroic in this book.
Now, I don’t want this all to bother you, reader. Because this is the whole point of the book! The book of Esther is about God working behind the scenes when things seem at their worst. Here we see a wicked pagan king, performing a wicked (and disgusting) pageant. We will see later that a wicked man named Haman is going to move forward with an air-tight plan to destroy the Jews. And we see that the heroes are not really all that heroic. All of that sets the stage for God, even though He is in the shadows, to be the true hero of this story!
Did you miss earlier posts? Check out Xerxes’ Outlandish Party and Vashti Takes A Stand