Faith Among The Faithless: 10-Day Reading PlanSample

Behind both Esther’s and Mordecai’s stories lies a grand backdrop of mythology. And it is that myth—more than simple human weakness, more than fear, more than failure of heart or nerve—that makes sense of all that we see in the story of Esther.

Xerxes was a god in a pantheon of gods, and his loss at war faded his glory but didn’t extinguish it. Everything about Persian society still pointed to his immortality, his power, and his total dominance of their world. There was even a divine way of talking about his loss to the Greeks—it was the triumph not only of Greek hoplites and superior tactics, but of the Greek gods over the Persians’.

To reckon with Xerxes was to reckon with immense, entrenched, mythologized power, and to live in his world was to be perpetually reminded of and bombarded by it. In the comfort of our own modern understanding of the world, we can see Xerxes as a mere human being, but it was nearly impossible to do so from where Mordecai and Esther sat. In part, that impossibility was enforced by Xerxes’ own expressions of power.

The myth of Xerxes’ divinity was made manifest in the grandiosity, wealth, and power of his empire. It was hard not to get swept up into belief.

So Mordecai handed over Esther, and Esther complied. The myths of Persia had captured them. They had a hard time seeing the world in any other way. The all-powerful king—one, again, referred to as the “King of Kings”—had demanded her, and the myth supposed that she belonged to him, one way or another, anyway. There are layers of lies here: the absolute will of the king versus the will of the girl, the ownership of the king’s subjects, the absence of any exercise of will over one’s own sexuality . . . These dehumanizing, dignity-destroying ideas were entrenched in the culture of Persia, and they became entrenched in Persia’s citizens.

Here again we need to be wary of creating too great a sense of distance between their world and ours. We’d like to think we live in a world where mythologies have been put away for good, but we would be wrong. Instead, we’ve simply exchanged our myths, exchanged the ways we enthrone power, and exchanged the ways that power expresses itself.