Today’s Scripture Reading (August 10, 2017): Esther
1
Whenever we read a modern
translation of the Bible – even the King James Version – we are accepting a set
of assumptions that someone has made for us. There is no one word to one-word translation available, so translators
work with concepts instead. And often as they work
with these ideas, the resultant
translation is the translator’s best guess as to what the words or concepts
mean. Often the guesses are very educated,
and we are pretty confident of what the words mean, but never-the-less, they
remain just guesses.
And Esther opens up with one
such guess. We are told that the events
of the story that we are about to be told happened during the reign of Xerxes
(NIV). The attempt is to anchor the story of Esther to a particular moment in
history. But the original Hebrew text doesn’t actually
mention Xerxes. The name referred to in the
Hebrew text is Ahasuerus. We
are pretty sure that Ahasuerus and Xerxes, or more specifically Xerxes
the Great, are the same king. It is our
best guess, one that we are fairly confident about, but we are not entirely
sure.
But if Ahasuerus and Xerxes the
Great are the same king, then the story
of Esther is anchored to a time when the Persian Empire dominated what we
sometimes describe as the known world – essentially the Middle East and the
land that surrounds it. That would make the story of Esther a story that
happened in the first half of the fifth century (Xerxes reigned as King for
about a twenty year period from 486 – 465 B.C.E).
The position of Esther in the
Bible has long been under attack. Strictly speaking, Esther seems to be more of
a book about Jewish history than a book about Jewish spirituality. The Book of
Esther is the only book in the Bible that does not mention the name of God. In spite of this, the story of Esther and
Xerxes has become a much-loved story in
both Judaism and Christianity. And in an interesting parallel between Jewish
and Persian culture, Persian Jews are often referred to as Esther’s Children –
paying homage to the story of Esther.
No matter what we believe about
the story, it is a story that has influenced our world – and because of that, it is a story that we need to know well.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Esther 2
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