Now would be a great time to pull that play out of the divine playbook. Now listen, men, this is the essential turn in the story for us all, where we take the right fork into Christianity or the left fork into everything else.
Make eye contact with Ahasuerus and understand: You are that guy. You are. I am that guy. Our anger may be righteous—and here it is! But how many of us have scoured the digital world , maybe for years , pleasing ourselves with our own harems of online women, many of them teenage girls with no lured into the film studio with promises of money and opportunity?
How many of us have used women as objects, lowered them from their status as image bearers of God and turned them into something to be used and discarded? How many of us have passively sat by, too lazy to discipline our kids, too lazy to raise them in the fear and understanding of the Lord? How many of us have passively abdicated and taught our families by our example to treat the local church like an optional accessory to our Christianity instead of a place to go and pour myself out in service of my brother and sister?
Every man who has sinned in domination or abdication is guilty in the same root ways as the king is here. Yes, be angry at sin when you see it out there, where you see it here in Esther chapter 2.
The true gospel of the Bible is a world-confounding thing. And then God confounds us again, climbing down into the clinging mud of our moral filth, entering into the very heart of it—the perfect Man, clothed in the weakness of flesh, and dying for sinners, some even as bad as Ahasuerus and you and me.
He confounds us in his mercy, refusing to hurl down the burning rocks of judgment that we know we deserve, and rather climbing onto a cross and swallowing down the combined judgment of sin for us all—the wrath poured out on Sodom and Egypt and Jerusalem and Rome combined and multiplied a hundredfold. He confounds us by cutting us down, slain by the perfect Law, only to raise us up righteous and seat us in the heavenly places as sons. Esther is meant to confound us all—all of the striving and self-righteous and wicked and weak sinners of earth, in need of King Jesus and his Kingdom, in need of his blood to cleanse us and his rule to lead us and his mercy to keep us.
Cleansed by the blood of the King! Does any of this hope show up in the darkness of these 18 verses? Just a glimmer. But this harsh landscape is actually the result of male sin upstream. They spurned their God, their good Father, and filled up the green groves of his Promised Land with festering swamps of idolatry.
They sacrificed some sons to Molech and abdicated their responsibility to train others up to fear and love God.
A howling, desert waste, haunt of owls and jackals. God promised to restore as well. Isaiah —19,. I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water! I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive! Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall make a name for the LORD, an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.
Your sin has made the garden a desert. But I will restore you. I will make the myrtle bloom in the desert! We make deserts of death in sin. God makes deserts bloom in grace. What deserts have you made? Men, are you like Ahasuerus? Turn from your sin. God is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He is a sin-forgiving Father. Repent and believe and rest in Christ and see him restore. I'm New. Plan Your Visit. What's Sunday Like? What We Believe. Current Series. All Sermon Series.
Songs Worth Singing. Pastor's Blog. Darius II was known as Darius Nothus Darius the bastard because his mother was a concubine, Artaxerxes having no surviving legitimate heir, and therefore Darius II would could not have been the son of a legitimate queen. If Esther really was married to Xerxes as stated in the Book of Esther, she would have been queen, legitimately married, and not a concubine.
Thus, the final word comes from biblical scholars, who say that the Book of Esther was a second-century-BCE Jewish novel. The author did not intend Queen Esther to have children. The only thing known about Queen Esther comes from the Book of Esther, which concludes with Esther still a young queen. Since the Book of Esther is not actually historical, we can not find information about Esther from historical sources.
King Xerxes was married to Queen Amestris at the very time that the book says he divorced Vashti and married Esther. According to the Book of Esther, Xerxes was celebrating the third year of his reign with a long party. On the seventh day of the party, Xerxes was drunk and called for Queen Vashti to be brought for the people to see, because she was fair to look at. Esther says that Vashti refused to come, and Xerxes was angry. The Book of Esther says no more, so we can only guess that the reason for her refusal could have been his drunken state.
We can not look outside the Book of Esther for an answer, because historians say that there seems never to have been a Queen Vashti, and that Amestris was queen until well after Xerxes' third year as king. Ahasuerus is believed to have been the Hebrew name for Xerxes. King Xerxes I ruled the Persian Empire at the appropriate time for the story of Esther, although he was not really her husband. He was a Mede, from a tribe closely related to the Persians and ancestral to the Iranians of today.
Historians do differ on this, because they say that King Xerxes' first wife was really named Amestris, and she continued a queen well beyond his third year as king the date the text suggests Vashti was deposed. There is considerable evidence that the Book of Esther is not really historical. In real life, the marriage never actually happened, because there was never either a Queen Vashti nor a Queen Esther of Persia. Historically, no one called Vashti or Esther was queen of Persia.
Answer:According to Jewish tradition, Esther was queen of the Persian empire, for about 11 years. The Book of Esther makes it clear that this was not in the early part of Xerxes's reign, when Amestris is placed by historians.
The name of Mordechai is considered identical to the name Marduka, which is attested as the name of officials in the Persian court in the Persepolis Texts from the period of Xerxes I.
One of these officials might very well be the biblical Mordecai. The gravesite of Mordecai and Esther still stands in Hamadan; and the Jews of Iran, to this day, are referred to as "the children of Esther. Log in. Tanakh and Talmud. Old Testament. Study now. See Answer. Best Answer. Study guides. New Testament 20 cards. A very important value of the Bible is that it. The Old Testament included the book of. The Protestant Reformation attempted to relate the bible to the.
Jealousy and anger shorten life comes from. New Testament 22 cards. What is known of the actual words of Jesus. Old Testament 22 cards. More answers. According to Jewish traditions Darius was born to Xerxes and Esther. I think esther was darius stepmother. According to Jewish tradings Darius was born to Xerxes and Esther.
Write your answer Related questions. When Darius died there were other claimants—Darius had at least three other wives, including another daughter of Cyrus, but apparently, the transition was not strongly contested. The investiture may have taken place at Zendan-e-Suleiman Solomon's Prison at Pasargadae, a sanctuary of the goddess Anahita near the hollow cone of an ancient volcano.
Darius had died abruptly, while he was preparing for war with Greece, which had been interrupted by the revolt of the Egyptians. Within the first or second year of Xerxes' rule, he had to quell an uprising in Egypt he invaded Egypt in BCE and left his brother Achaemenes governor before returning to Persia , at least two uprisings in Babylon, and perhaps one in Judah.
At the time Xerxes achieved the throne, the Persian empire was at its height, with a number of Persian satrapies governmental provinces established from India and central Asia to modern Uzbekistan, westward in North Africa to Ethiopia and Libya and the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Darius wanted to add Greece as his first step into Europe, but it was also a grudge rematch.
Cyrus the Great had earlier tried to capture the prize, but instead lost the Battle of Marathon and suffered the sack of his capital of Sardis during the Ionian Revolt — BCE.
Xerxes followed in his father's footsteps in what the Greek historians called a classic state of hubris : he was aggressively certain that the Zoroastrian gods of the mighty Persian empire were on his side and laughed at Greek preparations for battle. Estimates of his forces are ridiculously overblown. Herodotus estimated a military force of some 1.
The Persians crossed the Hellespont using a pontoon bridge and met a small group of Spartans led by Leonidas on the plain at Thermopylae. Vastly outnumbered, the Greeks lost. A naval battle at Artemision proved indecisive; the Persians technically won but took heavy losses. At the naval battle of Salamis , though, the Greeks were victorious under the leadership of Themistocles — BCE , but in the meantime, Xerxes sacked Athens and torched the Acropolis. After the disaster at Salamis, Xerxes installed a governor in Thessaly—Mardonius, with an army of , men—and returned to his capital at Sardis.
In addition to the complete failure to win Greece, Xerxes is famous for building Persepolis. Buildings constructed by Xerxes were specifically targeted for destruction by Alexander, whose writers nevertheless represent the best descriptions of the damaged buildings. The citadel included a walled palace area and a colossal statue of Xerxes.
There were lush gardens fed by an extensive canal system—the drains still work. Palaces, the apadana audience hall , a treasury and entrance gates all graced the city. Xerxes was married to his first wife Amestris for a very long time, although there's no record of when the marriage began.
Some historians argue that his wife was chosen for him by his mother Atossa, who selected Amestris because she was the daughter of Otanes and had money and political connections.
Artaxerxes I would reign for 45 years after Xerxes' death r. They stayed married, but Xerxes built an enormous harem, and while he was in Sardis after the Battle of Salamis, he fell in love with the wife of his full brother Masistes.
She resisted him, so he arranged a marriage between Masistes' daughter Artayne and his own eldest son Darius. After the party returned to Susa, Xerxes turned his attention to his niece.
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