Archives for May 2022

Second King, Part 3: Selfish Aims

May 30, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: We’ll See Who’s Boss

As we noted last time, the feast at which Queen Vashti refused to appear may have been Xerxes’ effort to get the backing of his nobles for his planned invasion of Greece; the timing works out nicely.

We know how the Persian invasion of Greece went. First there was a problem crossing the Hellespont; a storm destroyed the Persian bridge, and Xerxes had the water scourged just to teach it a lesson. Then a confederation of Greeks bottled the Persian army up at the pass at Thermopylae—though only temporarily. After Xerxes conquered Athens, however, the Greeks decisively defeated the Persian fleet at Salamis, leading Xerxes to head for home. The campaign had taken 3 years.

Back in Susa, Xerxes sought comfort in his harem. It would make sense for the elevation of Esther to take place at this time.

Xerxes cannot restore Vashti (Es 2.1), because the law is irreversible. But his advisers want Xerxes happy, so they devise a plan certain to be appealing to a lecher. He would select a queen not from his existing harem, or even from the families of the council of 7, as tradition dictated, but from all the virgins in the empire (Es 2.2-4). Josephus (Antiquities 11.6.2), whose historical reliability is … uneven, reports that about 400 young women were collected. One commentator notes, “Though this sounds like a beauty contest, it was not a very happy assignment for most of the women. They were uprooted from their communities, which implied confinement to the king’s harem, and moved to what would actually be perpetual widowhood.”

Such are the ways of ancient Near Eastern potentates.

And now (Es 2.5) we meet Mordecai. He’s a Jew, specifically a Benjamite, whose exiled great-grandfather was named Kish, likely for the father of the Benjamites’ favorite son, King Saul (1Ch 9.39). As I commented in the first post of this series, the name Mordecai appears to be derived from the name of the Babylonian god Marduk. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Mordecai’s parents had adopted pagan ways; it may simply have been a common name in that culture, or his parents may have known and admired another man with the name. We know that there was another man named Mordecai in the first return (Ezra 2.2; Ne 7.7)—and we suspect that those returnees were likely to be devout Jews. Another possibility is that Mordecai himself, like Daniel before him (Da 1.7), may have had a second, Babylonian name given to him by the king or someone else in the court. Interestingly, there is a record of a court official about this time named “Marduka,” who would have good reason to be in regular presence at the gate outside the court.

At any rate, Mordecai is raising his younger cousin, Esther, whose parents have died (Es 2.7). (Note that Esther has two names as well.) Esther, being in the top percentile for attractiveness, is swept up in the empire-wide collection for the king’s harem (Es 2.8).

Some have questioned whether Esther should have cooperated in such an arrangement. I’ll note, first, that she really didn’t have a choice. Second, polygamy was not viewed in that culture with the horror we see in it today; Esther, like everyone else who has ever lived, is a creature of her time. And third, the question is moot; the point of the story is not that everything Esther or Mordecai did was right and virtuous. I’ll get to the point eventually—see the title of the series—but I’ll just say for now that in terms of the story, it really doesn’t matter whether what she did was right or not.

And so Esther joins the harem of the most powerful man in the world. Unlike Daniel (Da 1.8), she apparently eats whatever food is set before her (Es 2.9)—with the result that her Jewish identity remains under wraps. And that will become a key part of the story.

As we shall see.

Photo credit: Xerxes’ tomb; dynamosquito from France, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Second King, Part 2: We’ll See Who’s Boss

May 26, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction

The last episode in the Old Testament story takes place in Persia, in Susa, the winter capital and royal residence. (In the summer, Susa was unpleasantly hot and thus inappropriate for a capital.) The king is Ahasuerus—more popularly known by the Greek version of his name, Xerxes. The episode begins in the third year of his reign (Es 1.3), which was 483 BC. The Greek historian Herodotus records that after his conquest of Egypt, which would have ended about this time, Xerxes convened an assembly of his nobles and announced his desire to invade and conquer Greece (Histories 7.8). Whether this is the occasion for the party in Esther 1 is just conjecture, but the timing seems about right, and it would make sense for Xerxes to display his wealth if he wanted to convince his nobles to support an invasion of Greece.

In any case, it was some party. The palace and banquet hall at Susa have been excavated, and the roofed hall was about the size of a football field. The hundreds (thousands?) of guests could eat, and drink, as much as they wanted. For six months. This king’s resources—and therefore his powers—are endless.

Right?

In a climactic, boastful display of power and pride, Xerxes calls for his wife to parade in front of his guests.

And she refuses.

The text doesn’t tell us why. Perhaps she was expected to appear nude. Perhaps she was pregnant; if the biblical Vashti is the same as Amestris, she was the mother of Artaxerxes, who would have born along about this time. Or perhaps she just didn’t want to be paraded around in front of a pampered, privileged, drunken mob.

But refuse she does. And so “Xerxes’ action is a parody on Persian might, for the powerful king could not even command his own wife” (HCBC). Xerxes, determined to punish her, seeks counsel from his advisers. Their immediate reaction shows that they are as self-obsessed as Xerxes himself; if Vashti can refuse her husband’s command, then—horror of horrors!—our wives can too. So, they advise, pass a decree—which in Persia is unalterable—banishing Vashti. It’s a broken world if a decree issued in drunkenness binds the rulers’ hands forever.

And the decree goes out “into all the king’s provinces” (Es 1.22), translated into all the recipient languages with the efficiency of the United Nations or the BBC. We won’t have anyone, not even the queen, disregarding the power of the One Great King, Xerxes.

It’s a big empire, stretching from India in the east to Ethiopia in the west (Es 1.1). But the Persians had ways of getting the message out efficiently. They had a sort of “Pony Express,” which Herodotus describes in something approaching wonder. Allegedly the riders could deliver a message from Susa to Sardis, in western Turkey, in 9 days or less. That’s 1200 miles.

Well. I guess we’ve solved that problem. Nobody’s bigger than Xerxes. Nobody tells him what to do. Not even his wife. Nosiree.

To be continued.

Photo credit: Xerxes’ tomb; dynamosquito from France, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Second King, Part 1: Introduction

May 23, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

At its heart, the Bible is a story. In the Old Testament, the story, which runs from Genesis to Esther, is about the nation of Israel, with a couple of appendices; the poetry and the prophets both give us background information and enrich the story in many ways, especially as they elucidate the nation’s relationship with God. But the story itself begins with creation and ends with … well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Most Christians are familiar with at least the broad arc of the story. God creates the world perfect, and soon man disobeys him, plunging himself and his environment into a life of death. God promises to restore life—and his first narrated move, perhaps surprisingly, is to bring more judgment in a global flood and then in scattering Noah’s descendants across the planet.

But with one of those descendants, Abram, God begins to make a special people, soon naming them “Israel.” He makes grand promises to them, but in the short term at least, he doesn’t appear to be keeping them. Israel spends 400 years outside their gifted homeland, much of that time in slavery.

Then God calls an Israelite, Moses, to lead his people out of Egypt and back to The Land. Under Joshua they conquer Canaan, but they seem unable to govern themselves. After a long cycle of failure, they receive from God a king, David, and a promise that his line will never end.

But it does end. Or at least it seems to. Just a generation later David’s kingdom is divided by civil war, and most of the land—and the people—give sovereignty to an upstart, non-Davidic king. For 200 years there are two nations instead of one. And both sink into idolatry.

Then more judgment. God sends the rebel kingdom into exile in Assyria and warns the remnant Davidic kingdom, Judah, to straighten up. They don’t. And 150 years later they too go into Mesopotamian exile, this time in Babylon.

What about the promises—to Abram? to David?

One of many things we learn from this story is the danger of making snap judgments about God. As Creator of time and Lord over it, he has no need or inclination to hurry, and like any good teacher, he gives his students time to discover things for themselves—even if they’re slow learners.

The exiled Israelites never return from Assyria. But 70 years after Judah’s initial deportation, their enemies the Babylonians are dethroned from their regional domination when Persia overruns the capital. The Persian conqueror, Cyrus, is relatively enlightened for his time; he figures that the best way to achieve peace in an empire of conquered and displaced people groups is just to let them all go home.

And so, two years after the exiled Jews change emperors, the new guy says they can return to their homeland. Many people are surprised that the vast majority of exiles don’t take up the offer, but they shouldn’t be. It’s been at least 50 years since any of these people have seen their homeland—which means, of course, that most of the exiles had been born in Babylon. In a real sense, Babylon is home to them; they don’t feel like exiles at all.

So most of them stay. A relative few, under the leadership of Zerubbabel, and later Ezra and Nehemiah, return and begin the arduous task of rebuilding everything from scratch. But most stay.

And 50 years later, long after Zerubbabel and Haggai and Zechariah have fulfilled their ministries in Jerusalem, there is in the Persian capital of Susa, more than 200 miles east of Babylon, a Jewish man, apparently a government functionary. He is named for the Babylonian god Marduk. And his story is the last episode in the biblical story of the nation of Israel, the spine of the Old Testament.

We’ll spend a few posts looking more closely at the story of Mordecai, his king, and his cousin.

See you next time.

Photo credit: Xerxes’ tomb; dynamosquito from France, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On Lions—and The Lion

May 19, 2022 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking about lions. The Bible mentions lions 150 times; the poets and the prophets particularly like to use leonine imagery, and we shouldn’t be surprised by that, since Asiatic lions indisputably lived in Palestine in biblical times. (Nowadays they’re pretty much limited to India.)

Several biblical characters interacted with lions—most famously David the shepherd boy, as he related to King Saul just before dispensing with Goliath (1S 17.34-37). But there were others, including Samson (Jg 14.5-18), Benaiah (2S 23.20; 1Ch 11.22), an unnamed prophet from Bethel (1K 13.24-28), the neighbor of another unnamed prophet (1K 20.36), and the ancestors of the Samaritans (2K 17.25-26).

Lions are the kind of animal that would tend to make an impression. It’s no surprise, then, that they show up as decorative motifs in important places—specifically in Solomon’s Temple (1K 7.29, 36) and in his palace (1K 10.19-20; 2Ch 9.18-19), next to his throne. That’s the image you might use if you want to make an impression on foreign visitors—or, for that matter, on your own people.

It also makes sense that significant people would be compared to lions. Three of the tribes of Israel are—Judah (Gn 49.9), Gad (Dt 33.20), and Dan (Dt 33.22)—as is the whole nation of Israel (Nu 23.24; 24.9). David, mourning over King Saul and Prince Jonathan, compares them to lions (2S 1.23), and some of David’s famed “mighty men” are compared to lions as well (1Ch 12.8). Interestingly, those men are from the tribe of Gad, which has already been mentioned.

In the New Testament, the devil is compared to a lion (1P 5.8)—which might give us pause when we read later that “the Lion of the tribe of Judah” is none other than Jesus Christ (Re 5.5).

Seeing lions up close certainly enriches one’s appreciation of the metaphor. I’ve been privileged to take 7 different trips into the Serengeti, both as a treat for BJU students on my mission teams and as an opportunity for Tanzanian orphans to see their country’s rich resource. We have seen lions up close on all but one of those safaris. One of the groups had the extraordinary opportunity to see a lioness take down a wildebeest literally right in front of our vehicles, not 20 feet away. As she choked it to death, she looked unflinchingly right at us, as if to say, “You really don’t want to mess with me …”

Which brings me to the characteristic of lions that has most impressed itself on me.

They’re absolutely fearless.

They have no predators. Top of the food chain. They’re not called “the king of the jungle” for nothing.

(And, by the way, the Serengeti, like virtually all of the rest of Africa, is not jungle. It’s savannah, much like the grassland prairies of the American West.)

You drive the safari vehicle up to a pride of lions, and they just ignore you. They look away as if bored. Occasionally one will get up and sidle around the vehicle, rubbing against it as though marking its territory. But as long as you remain quiet, you’ll be ignored.

They know you can’t hurt them.

But they are not to be disrespected. On one trip, as a male lion and one of his mates were ambling around our vehicle, the well-experienced guide, Vincent, whispered, “If you want to die, get out of the car.”

We didn’t.

On another trip we saw 17 lions lounging under the shade of an acacia tree—the second-most our guide had ever seen together. They, too, ignored us.

Confidence. Pride. Seeming disinterest.

But awesome power and speed and potential for violence and destruction.

Respect the lion.

Jesus, our Savior, is not just a lion, but the lion of the royal tribe of Judah. He has no enemies that can cause him concern; he has no predators; he has no equals. He can be calm and peaceable, just as he went to his death with no resistance (Is 53.7). He is the Lamb of God (Re 5.6).

But do not take his gentleness, his mercy, for weakness. Even as a Lamb, he displays wrath that brings desperate fear to his enemies (Re 6.16).

The Lion will deliver his people.

… and Back Again

May 16, 2022 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Ten weeks ago I tested positive for COVID, and two weeks later I took a break from blogging. The disease wasn’t overly bad for me—just a noticeable sore throat and some coughing—and I’m glad that I didn’t appear to get the Long variety. (I know a few people who did.)

But I could tell that the brain wasn’t at 100%, and I didn’t want to be posting my thoughts publicly when I was more likely even than usual to say something I’d later regret.

Providentially, right then we entered a point in the semester where I was crazily busy, busier than at any other time during the year. Fortunately, it’s a time I can see coming and get prepared for, but for several days it’s just Katie bar the door.

After that, the papers started to come in.

I’m one of those teachers who believes fervently in the importance of assigning writing, and specifically writing that requires thought (as opposed to those “discussion posts” you see the kids cranking out in their sleep for their online courses). As every teacher knows, the inescapable consequence of assigning thoughtful writing is that at some point you’re going to need to grade, or at least read, the output. Some of it grades pretty easily. But not all, my friend, not all.

My school used to have a policy that all major papers and projects needed to be due a few weeks before the end of the semester. That policy doesn’t exist anymore, but I still hold to the practice, for a couple of reasons. First, I need time to grade the work effectively, and the kids (or their parents) are paying a pretty penny for my due diligence. And second, it gives the students an opportunity to see their post-project grades when there’s still enough time in the semester to do something about them.

So. COVID, then post-COVID, then crazy busy, then paper-grading season. At that point I decided to just let the blog lie until the semester was done.

Commencement was a week ago, and we sent our 650 graduates off to take the next step. I had several faculty responsibilities that occupied the week following Commencement. But this past Friday I completed the last of those, and now it’s Summer Vacation.

When I began teaching full-time in 2000 (at the age of 46), I was delighted to discover that I had options for how I spent the summers. Early on I decided to look for opportunities to teach pro bono (as the lawyers say) in small Bible colleges overseas that could use some help. The first was in the summer of 2000 in the area of Cape Town. It was delightful, and not just because of the rooibos, biltong, and koeksisters.

Other opportunities followed. Saipan. Mexico. China. St Vincent. India. Haiti. And several delightful summers leading BJU student teams to minister in Africa, from Ghana to Kenya to Tanzania to Zambia to South Africa.

For six years I was my father’s caregiver during his dementia, and I was privileged to do that. Having the summers free really helped.

Well, the pandemic put the kibosh on international teaching, and in much of the world the situation’s still iffy. It’s simple enough to go teach overseas, but what if they change the rules in mid-trip? What if we can’t get back? These are not questions to dismiss lightly.

So this summer is a sabbatical. Not working anywhere officially. Teaching a handful of classes at my church, serving there in other ways as well. I have a study plan laid out, with fair amounts of reading and thinking and planning. And best of all, no inflexible deadlines. No reason not to be interrupted. Something needs to be fixed? Well, why not? Need something at the store, and traffic’s pretty heavy right now? No problem. All the time in the world. Smile and wave at the other drivers, and let that guy cut in.

Now, that environment’s just perfect for getting back into the rhythm of writing two blog posts a week. I’m looking forward to it.

Drop by the site in the days ahead if you care to.