Esther and the deadly Dilemma was a five part series that I taught at unedited spirituality in the fall of 2011. I’m hoping over the next few months to convert my notes into something readable.

you can find the audio of the teaching here

Part 1: Context and Characters

An important part of the journey towards maturity is the push to make sure our faith is defined by more than just the obvious answers. There’s a beauty in exploring the popular texts in the scriptural story but then are moments where we reach through the surface into the depths of the text to discover something new, something forgotten, and perhaps something surprisingly transformational.

This is often my experience when I reach back into the Old Testament narrative books and it’s exactly what we encounter in the story of Esther. A somewhat small story about an isolated period of Jewish history that, if we allow, has significant implications for our faith journey today.

All of the books in the Bible are fascinating in their own way. Their content and their context and what they’re trying to say about God and humanity is worth exploring. Esther, however, is an odd text. For one, it’s a book in our Bible that doesn’t mention or reference God… at all, which is unexpected.

It’s also one of two books in our Bible named after a woman and that’s puts Esther in somewhat rare territory. There’s no need to pretend that the Bible is not a heavily male dominated book. It just is. Anything less than that acknowledgment smacks of hiding our head in the sand. It was written in heavily male dominated cultures, by largely culturally biased authors (strike that men), who generally did not see women the way we do today. Now, I’m not defending that and I don’t think the bible is necessarily defending that, it’s just a fact of the history.

If you’ve ever seen a Sean Connery James Bond movie you know how much our culture has changed in a very short amount of time. We all know Bond is a womanizer, that’s part of the character but watching Bond in the 1960s is almost uncomfortable. Connery’s Bond makes Daniel Craig’s Bond look like prince charming, the guy you’d want to bring home to meet your parents. Some stories are just a product of their time.

So when we see something like Esther rise to the surface and we know it’s coming out of a culture where the idea of a female protagonist is going to be an exception rather than the rule and yet there it is staring you in the face, it’s probably worth paying attention to. That point becomes even more clear as dig into the story and actually find that the content of the tale is no less sexist or at times even demeaning to women than we might expect it to be given the culture. The simple fact that a story about the courage and strength of a particular women breaks through the culture stereotypes to fix itself in the cultural consciousness means we should probably pay special attention to what it’s saying to us.

The Bible like is a product of its culture or perhaps better said its cultures. Each story is shaped by cultural stereotypes and cultural expectations just the same way we are-

and sometimes that scares us-

but we know it’s true.

What surrounds us impacts us. Our family of origin is part of who we are. The complex mix of nature and nurture, the way we grow up, the family we grow up in, it all imprints itself on us in a very real way. You can take it even further to recognize that the fact we are alive today in a period of history where there are communication tools like Facebook and Skype and that facilitate global communication, this reality is shaping the way we think about ourselves and the world we live in. No one in history has seen the world we see. In the same way, every book of the Bible and every biblical writer was shaped and impacted and influenced by the world that was around them at time they wrote. What this means is that we have to do a lot of work when we read the Bible. We have to sift and wrestle and work and reach to understand how these stories would to speak to us today in a very different context from where they were written.

This is why a community is a non negotiable part of a healthy Christian hermeneutic. We wrestle with the text together.

Sometimes that is an expression of physical community. A church where we gather to listen and learn and respond together. Sometimes this sense of community is less tangible. We invite writers both contemporary and classic into our discussion. In fact, even as we engage with the biblical text we have already invited a host of scholars and translators into our discussion and one of the best ways to broaden the scope of your conversation is simply to engage with multiple English translations of a particular text.