Esther Becomes Queen

We believe that Esther and Judith lived in this period, but I confess that I cannot easily see which kings in particular I should connect with the events of their lives. Esther is said to have lived under King Artaxerxes, but I find that there were two Persian kings of that name, and there is much doubt about which of them her date belongs to. Still, I have preferred to connect Esther’s story with the Artaxerxes under whom Jerusalem was restored. For if she had lived under the earlier Artaxerxes, whose times Ezra recorded, it is not likely that he would have made no mention of so famous a woman. This is all the more convincing because we know that the building of the temple was forbidden by that Artaxerxes, as we related above, and Esther would not have allowed that if she had then been married to him. [a]

But now I will go over what she accomplished. There was at that time a woman named Vashti, married to the king, a woman of wonderful beauty. The king was in the habit of praising her loveliness to everyone, and one day, while he was giving a public banquet, he ordered the queen to come so that her beauty could be shown off. But she, wiser than the foolish king and too modest to put herself on show before the eyes of men, refused to obey. His savage temper was enraged by this insult, and he drove her out both from her marriage with him and from the palace.

So when a young woman was sought to take her place as the king’s wife, Esther was found to surpass all the others in beauty. She was a Jewish woman of the tribe of Benjamin, an orphan with neither father nor mother, and she had been brought up by her cousin Mordecai. When she was betrothed to the king, she followed the instructions of the man who had raised her and kept her nation and homeland hidden. He also warned her not to forget the traditions of her fathers, and, though as a captive she had married a foreigner, not to share in the food of the pagans. So, once married to the king, she soon and easily, as was to be expected, won his whole heart by the power of her beauty, so that he made her his equal in the emblem of royal power and gave her a purple robe.