Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Esther · About this commentary
If I Perish, I Perish
Esther 4:15-17
15 Then Esther asked them to answer Mordecai, · WEB
Three verses in which the person being instructed starts giving orders, and the fast has no prayer reported with it.
The reversal in these three verses is easy to miss. Through the whole book so far Esther has obeyed — Mordecai commanded, and she did as she had done when he brought her up Esther 2:20. Here she gives the instructions, and verse 17 records the result: Mordecai went his way, and did according to all that Esther had commanded him.
What she orders is a fast. All the Jews in Susa, three days and nights, and I and my maidens will also fast the same way.
And here the book's characteristic silence is at its most audible. Fasting in Scripture normally accompanies prayer, and no prayer is reported. Not a word of petition, no address to God, no vow. A three-day corporate fast is described and its content is left blank, in a book that names no God from beginning to end.
What the fast is for is stated only in what follows it: then I will go in to the king. It is preparation for an act, not a substitute for one.
Then she names the obstacle without minimizing it — which is against the law — and gives the sentence the book is remembered for: if I perish, I perish.
It is not confidence and it is not resignation. The grammar accepts a real possibility of death without treating that as a reason to stop, which is a different thing from expecting to survive. Nobody in the story has promised her anything; Mordecai's assurance was that deliverance would come from another place Esther 4:14, with no guarantee attached to her.
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