Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Esther · About this commentary
A Search for a Queen
Esther 2:1-11
1 After these things, when the wrath of King Ahasuerus was pacified, he remembered Vashti, and what she had done, and what was decreed against her. · WEB
The replacement of the queen is organized as an administrative procedure, and the two people the story turns on are introduced without ceremony.
The king remembered Vashti, and the servants' proposal manages the memory rather than the regret: let a search be made. What follows is a levy — officers in every province, young women gathered to the citadel, a keeper appointed, cosmetics issued. The book describes it in the vocabulary of supply.
Nothing in the account suggests the women had a choice, and the book does not soften it. Esther was taken into the king's house Esther 2:8, the verb passive.
Verses 5 and 6 introduce Mordecai with a genealogy and a history. He is the son of Jair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish, a Benjamite — and his family had been carried away from Jerusalem with the captives taken with Jeconiah. Two generations at least from the deportation, and still identified by it.
Verse 7 introduces Esther with two names and a bereavement: Hadassah, that is, Esther — the first name occurring nowhere else in Scripture — and she had neither father nor mother. An orphan raised by a cousin who took her for his own daughter.
Then verse 10, and it is the detail the next four chapters depend on: Esther had not made known her people nor her relatives, on Mordecai's instruction. The book offers no evaluation of the concealment, and no explanation of why he thought it necessary.
Verse 11 shows him walking past the women's court every day to learn how she was. It is the only glimpse of affection in the chapter, and it is the act of a man who has handed someone over and cannot follow.
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