Commentary on Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22, 29-32

Week 6: July 5, 2026

Preaching text: Esther 7:1-10, 9:1-2, 20-22, 29-32; accompanying text: Luke 1:68-72

This week, the preacher should, again, fill in the details of the story. Esther invites King Ahasuerus and Haman to two banquets. On the night between the banquets, the king has insomnia. He asks for the annals of the kingdom to be read to him, and as it happens, the record he hears is about a time when Mordecai saved his life. He decides to reward Mordecai and asks Haman (who has come to the royal residence to ask for permission to kill Mordecai) how he should reward a man “whom the king wishes to honor.” Haman thinks to himself, “Whom would the king wish to honor more than me?” (6:6). He tells the king to throw a parade for the honoree, and then, humiliated, he is made to do that very thing for Mordecai, his sworn enemy.

The second banquet, then, is where Esther reveals herself as a Jew and Haman as the enemy of the Jews (chapter 7). The king is enraged and has Haman impaled on the ludicrously tall stake (75 feet tall) that he had built to kill Mordecai.¹

The end of the book (chapters 8–10) describes a great reversal. At Esther’s urging, the king has another decree made that on the very day marked for the Jews’ annihilation, the Jews are to defend themselves against their enemies. They do so, killing 75,000 of those who hate them. This massacre is ethically troubling to moderns but seems to be a part of the hyperbole of the book, like the six-month feast and the 75-foot-tall stake. The humor of the book relies in great part on hyperbole and coincidence.

Coincidence is also important to the issue of divine absence in the book. God is never mentioned in the book of Esther. But out of all the women in the empire, Esther is chosen as queen. And out of all the annals that could be read to the king, the one chosen contains the story of Mordecai saving the king’s life. And when the king seeks advice on what should be done for Mordecai, Haman just happens to be present. And on the very day that the Jews were marked for slaughter, “the opposite happened” and they decisively defeat their enemies, turning that day “from sorrow to joy and from mourning to a holiday” (9:1, 22).

Jon Levenson, reflecting on the coincidences in the book of Esther, puts it this way: “It is … reasonable to assume that the author [of Esther] endorsed the old saw that ‘a coincidence is a miracle in which God prefers to remain anonymous.’”²

A coincidence is a miracle in which God prefers to remain anonymous. Beneath the humor of the book of Esther, there runs a kind of hopeful certainty—a certainty that against the odds, and by the hand of hidden providence, the Jews as a people will survive.

At the end of the book, a new holiday is established, Purim (9:18–32), which is still celebrated today. It is a time of revelry, celebrating the fact that in the face of genocidal hate, “the opposite happened” and the Jews survived. Eugene Peterson writes movingly about Purim:

Life together is celebrated as a joyous gift, snatched unbelievably from the gates of death and hell. A people who had faced the possibility of not being are emphatically alive. Community is not explained in historical terms, it is not analyzed in sociological terms, it is enjoyed in the language and rituals and food and laughter of a festival. …

The fact is that, decimated and dispersed as [Jewish communities] were, they were not swallowed up in the ocean of pagan power and culture and religion. They survived. By grace. The empire did not.³

The pharaohs and the Assyrians are no more. The Babylonian and Persian empires are no more. Czarist Russia and the Third Reich are the stuff of history. But the Jews have survived, and that sheer historical fact testifies to God’s faithfulness to God’s people. That divine faithfulness, hidden though it may be, is what undergirds the story of Esther and continues to inspire faith in those who read it—Jew and Christian alike.

Notes

1. Many English translations understand the Hebrew word describing the means of execution as a “gallows” rather than a “stake.” The word can be translated either way.
2. Jon D. Levenson, Esther: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 19.
3. Eugene Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 199, 214.