• Starting book of Esther next Sunday.  Maybe you’ve never thought of this, but I think there are some tough questions to answer before we can jump into the book.  Christian scholars through the ages have a wide variety of explanations that perhaps we must struggle through a bit to come to most Scriptural understanding of Esther.  Here are a few things to get you thinking.
• Occurs roughly 50 years after (530 to 480)  the 70 year exile was finished and the first return to Jerusalem.  So what was Mordecai doing, working in a heathen capital?
• Why is there no mention of God or prayer anywhere in the book?
• Why is the feast of Purim and the book of Esther never mentioned in the NT?
• Here is an interesting article (Part 1, Part 2) that discusses some of these sticky questions.
• A basic understanding of the chronology is helpful.  Here is a detailed article of the contemporary kings.

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• What do you think is the main point of chapter 1?
• Xerxes: Here is a quote from J. Sidlow Baxter regarding the nature of this fine specimen of a king.

11 What then of Xerxes? This is the king who ordered a bridge to be built over the Hellespont, and who, on learning that the bridge had been destroyed by a tempest, just after its completion, was so blindly enraged that he commanded three hundred strokes of the scourge to be inflicted on the sea, and a pair of fetters to be thrown into it at the Hellespont, and then had the unhappy builders of the bridge beheaded. This is the king who, on being offered a sum equivalent to five and a half million sterling by Pythius, the Lydian, towards the expenses of a military expedition, was so enraptured at such loyalty that he returned the money, accompanied by a handsome present; and then, on being requested by this same Phthius, shortly afterwards, to spare him just one of his sons—the eldest—from the expedition, as the sole support of his declining years, furiously ordered the son to be cut into two pieces, and the army to march between them. This is the king who dishonoured the remains of the heroic Spartan, Leonidas. This is the king who drowned the humiliation of his inglorious defeat in such a plunge of sensuality that he publicly offered a prize for the invention of some new indulgence. This is the king who cut a canal through the Isthmus of Athos for his fleet—a prodigious undertaking. This is the king whose vast resources, and gigantic notions and imperious temper made the name of Persia to awe the ancient world. Herodotus tells us that among the myriads gathered for the expedition against Greece, Ahasuerus was the fairest in personal beauty and stately bearing. But morally he was a mixture of passionate extremes. He is just the despot to dethrone queen Vashti for refusing to expose herself before his tipsy guests. He is just the one to consign a people like the Jews to be massacred, and then to swing over to the opposite extreme of sanctioning Jewish vengeance on thousands of his other subjects. J. Sidlow Baxter, Explore the Book (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House [reprint], six volumes in one, 1960), Vol. 2, pp. 262-263.