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Why hasn’t somebody made a major motion picture based on the story of Esther?
Why is this book in the Bible?
I’m going to shelve both of these questions until we’ve looked at the story, so that you might be in a better position to make up your own minds.
Chapter 1 introduces us to both the environment of the story and to one of the main characters. We are in Persia in the late 5th Century B.C. The Jews are living in exile, and a king by the name of Ahasuerus is on the throne.
Ahasuerus is better-known elsewhere in history by another name – Xerxes – and is best known for his complete failure to conquer the Greeks in the earlier years of his reign.
Yesterday I watched some of a marathon being run. Many of you will know that the first marathon was run after the battle of Marathon – where one poor Greek guy ran so hard and fast after the battle to tell the good news of victory to his king that he died as soon as he had given the message!
Marathon was a victory to the Greeks over the Persians who were then led by Darius, Xerxes’ father. Xerxes returned to Greece to avenge his father’s defeat in 480 B.C. with an army that Herodutus numbered at 2.5 million! He defeated the Spartans at Thermopylae, but was then thoroughly destroyed by the Greeks in the naval battle of Salamis. He returned to his capital beaten but, like his father, and like his modern counterpart, Saddam Hussein, he managed initially to hang on to absolute power in his own region.
The other story I remember about Xerxes was that story about his friend who held a banquet for a great part of his army on the night before they headed off to battle. In the morning, the