Esther Was Seventy-Five When the King's Men Took Her
She was not a beauty. Her skin was sallow, her height ordinary, and she was seventy-five years old the day they walked her into the palace.
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They Took Her Out of Mordecai's House
The collectors went street by street through Shushan taking the young women, and they took her too.
She was not a beauty. The word people used about her was grace, which is what people say when the face itself does not do the work. Her skin had a yellow-green cast to it, the color of a myrtle leaf. She was neither tall nor short, and a myrtle is neither large nor small, and that is the other reason she was called Hadassah. She was seventy-five years old.
Mordecai had kept her out of sight in his house for years, out of reach of the king's men who went through the city listing the eligible. The name he had raised her under meant the one who conceals. She had been concealed by an uncle, and now she walked into a palace where every question was designed to open her, and she stopped answering them. Where are you from. Who are your people. She would not say, and she went on not saying it for years.
Hegai Brought the King's Dishes
The chamberlain in charge of the women took an interest in her immediately, and the interest expressed itself as food. Hegai sent her the good things off the royal table, the meat, the delicacies, the things a girl from a poor house would not have seen.
She would not touch them.
She ate vegetables. She kept eating vegetables, in a palace that measured favor by what came to your room, the way three young men had done at another king's table in Babylon a lifetime earlier. The forbidden dishes she passed along to the servants who were not Jews, so that nothing was wasted and nobody had to be told why.
They gave her seven attendants. All seven were Jewish girls, and every one of them kept the law as strictly as she did, which meant that for the rest of her life the only people who could have reported her were people who would have had to report themselves.
Who Went In to the King at Night
Here is the part the scroll states without explaining. In the evening she would go in to Ahasuerus, and in the morning she would come back to the house of the women.
The one who went in was not Esther.
God kept her out of that room. A second was put there in her place, a double built in her likeness, and the double crossed the threshold in the evening and came back in the morning, and the king took his queen and never once had her. The kabbalists read the doubled word in the verse as the seam where the substitution shows: the second, the other one, the shape that went instead.
So she lived four ways at once. Her name was not her name, her food was not the palace food, her attendants were her own people, and her body was not in the bed the empire thought it was in.
Ten Thousand Talents of Silver
Then Haman weighed out ten thousand talents of silver on the counting table and bought a nation.
He had ten sons, and the mystics counted them as ten crowns of the other side, ten hollow answers to the ten by which holiness is measured, and every one of them coming for the woman in the palace and the people she would not name.
She had no army, no counsel, no ally with rank. She had a hidden name, a vegetable diet, seven girls, and a double.
Not Thirsty for Food or Drink
The psalm that sings about a deer at the water is not sung about a strong animal. The deer is a devout creature. When the herds are dry and standing about and suffering, the deer is the one that turns and calls out to the Lord, and the psalm's whole claim is that it is answered.
The rabbis heard Esther in that verse, and they had her say what she wanted while the palace fed her, dressed her, guarded her and got her wrong.
"I am not thirsty for food. I am not thirsty for drink. My soul is thirsty for You. To see Your face, I say to my heart: seek His face."
She said it in a room with servants outside the door, in a house where the whole point of her was her appearance, at seventy-five, under an assumed name, with someone else's body doing her marriage for her. Abraham had walked out of his father's house at seventy-five, and God had told him then that the one who would deliver his children in Media would be seventy-five as well. The arithmetic had been sitting there for a thousand years waiting for the collectors to come down her street.
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