From the desk fo Liesl St. James

Next we dive into the book of Esther.

The book opens in the court of Ahasuerus, the king of Shushan (say Shushan three times fast…I dare ya’). Ahasuerus decides to have a feast. And the entertainment for this feast will be him showing off his wife, Vashti. So everybody’s sitting around eating and he calls his wife. “Vashti! Git yo ass in here and show everybody how hot you are!” Then he turns to the guys around him and says “y’all won’t believe the ass on this woman. Three kids and still built like a brick house!” Vashti had been studying the latest in feminist literature and wasn’t down with being just a piece of ass. “Hell to the no!” she responded. All the guys at the feast look around at each other uncomfortably. Then one guy says “You know, if my wife hears about this, she’s going to think she has a brain in her head, too. I really don’t want her realizing that she does.”

The king says “good point” and has Vashti killed. As you do when your wife backtalks. But then he’s left in a conundrum. He has no wife. “Hmmm…I need one of those…” he contemplates to himself. So he has all the women in his kingdom paraded in front of him in the ultimate speed dating session. He finds a girl named Esther. He decides she’ll do. What Esther doesn’t tell him is that she’s Jewish and being raised by her cousin, Mordechai (Morty). The king marries her. Then not long after, Morty discovers a plot to kill the king. He reveals it and the plotters are executed and Morty’s service to the king is recorded in the big books where things like that are recorded.

Morty appoints himself to sit at the palace gates for some reason. The Wal-Mart greeter of Shushan, I guess. Haman, the new prime minister, doesn’t like Morty because Morty won’t bow to him when he comes in. Somehow, Haman founds out that Morty is Jewish. He decides since Morty won’t bow to him, he’ll do the only logical thing. He’ll kill every single Jewish person in the entire kingdom, Morty included. Sounds logical. He goes to the king and asks “Are you cool with me killing all the Jews?” The king responds “sure, they weren’t doing much anyway. When do you want to do it?” They throw a dart at the calendar and decide to do it on the 13th of Adar (a Jewy month – the Roman’s hadn’t made up their own months yet).

Morty finds out that all the Jews are to be killed. He responds the only way anybody would – by ordering fasting and prayer. Not running and screaming like the wussies now would do. No. Fasting and prayer. Esther finds out about the plans and asks all the Jews to join her in three days of prayer. On the third day, she asks the king to have a feast with her and Haman. During that feast they make plans to have another feast the next day. Why they couldn’t get everything out in the open at the first feast is beyond me. In the mean time, Haman builds the gallows for Morty.

That night. The king can’t sleep. He does what anybody would do when they couldn’t sleep – he asks that his people read him boring government documents to put him out. Like reading tax code or something. Reeeeeeaaaaallllllyyyyyyyyyy boring. It just so happens that his people decide to read him the book where it was recorded that Morty foiled the plot against him. The king realizes he owes Morty his life! And he asked not to be recognized for it because it’s all in a day’s work for a responsible citizen.

Just then, Haman walks in. The king asks him what he should do to honor a great man. Haman believes the king is asking what Haman himself wants. So he says “well…if it were ME you were honoring and it was ME that would get this, I would want to be dressed up in your royal robes and paraded around on that badassed horse you’ve got.” The king responds “Good. Then dress Morty up in my robes and parade him around on my horse. He’s a good guy and should be honored.”

Later that evening, the king, Esther and Haman had the second banquet. Esther revealed to everybody that she was a Jew. The king left the room in a rage – as you do when you find out your wife is secretly Jewish and slated for extermination the next day. After all the trouble he went to in picking her out…now he’ll have to have all the women paraded again…it’s exhausting. Haman, realizing things don’t look good for him, begs Esther for his life. The king walks back in and catches the scene at all the wrong angle. To him, it looks like his (newly Jewish) wife is being raped by Haman. He gets even madder and orders Haman to be hanged in the gallows Haman himself had built for Morty.

Now the problem is, because they’d already chosen the date to kill all the Jews, the king couldn’t go back on his word. He’d throw a dart at a calendar! What was there to do? So he decreed that the Jews were allowed to fight back, rather than just passively be slaughtered. As a result, on the 13th of Adar, 500 attackers who were out for a good ethnic cleansing were killed, including Haman’s ten sons. 75,000 other attackers are killed outside the city. And another 300 people are killed the following day.

Morty becomes prominent in the king’s court and institutes an annual celebration of the delivery of the Jews from annihilation (this time) called purim.