Bible Question: Why is the book of Esther in the Bible?

Bible Answer: Because God said so is the short answer, but that's like the saying parents use when they don't know how to answer a child's persistent "why" questions.

Why some books are included in the Bible and others are not goes back to the early years of Christianity when church councils made the decisions forming the final collection of 66 books as the Old and New Testaments.

Some of the books that were left out of the final canon, as scholars call the Bible, are in the Apocrypha. This collection of 14 books is included in the Old Testament for Catholic versions of the Bible, but not Protestant versions. Still more books supposedly written in New Testament times are not included in our modern Bible.

But the question is not why some books were left out, but why the book of Esther is included in the Bible.

I have never studied the history of how our Bible was formed and can offer no insight in how the decision was made by which early church council to include Esther.

But I can offer my opinion on the usefulness of Esther, which I have read and studied and find to be fascinating.

It covers a time in the history of the Jewish people when they were in captivity under the rule of King Ahasuerus, who is generally believed to be the same as Xerxes in our history books, during the years 485-464 B.C.

His queen displeased him, so Ahasuerus had auditions for a new queen, and chose a young Jewess named Esther as the most beautiful young virgin in his entire kingdom.

Esther's uncle Mordecai had raised her, and advised her to keep quiet about her Jewish heritage, Esther 2:20 says.

Trouble arose when Ahasuerus appointed a man named Haman as his chief adviser. All the king's people bowed to him, except Mordecai, who refused to bow due to his Jewish faith, which directed him to bow to no man.

Mordecai was apparently an important man in his own right, for Haman decided that to get rid of Mordecai, he would have to destroy the entire race of Jews to do so.

So Haman hatched a plot to kill all the Jews in captivity.

The most famous verse is Esther 4:14, where Mordecai sends word to Esther that she must reveal her Jewish heritage to the king and attempt to save her people.

"For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

Esther was risking her life to go to the king without an invitation, but she did so, saying in Esther 4:16, "Go, gather all the Jews who are present in Shushan, and fast for me; neither eat nor drink for three days, night and day. My maids and I will fast likewise. And so I will go to the king, which is against the law; and if I perish, I perish!"

Meanwhile, Haman's scheming continued and he built a gallows to hang Mordecai on when the day arrived for his plot to be carried out to kill all the Jews in captivity.

But God put Esther in the right place at the right time to avert the plot, and Haman was hanged on his own gallows.

If there had been no Esther, God would have had to save His people some other way, as Mordecai said, but there was an Esther, and she did speak up for her people. And that, in my opinion, is why there is a book of Esther.

Submit Bible questions by email to writeme@johnwmyers.com

(John Myers has been a Christian lay speaker, Sunday School adult teacher and newspaper Bible study columnist for more than 20 years.)