The Orphan Queen of Persia Who Argued With God

Before the Scepter

Before the crown. Before the golden scepter. Before the great reversal of Purim. There was a woman alone on the floor of her chamber, covered in ash, with her hair loose and her royal garments in a pile beside her.

Esther stripped off everything that marked her as queen of the Persian empire. Every jewel, every ornament, every garment of her majesty. She put on sackcloth and poured dust on her head and lay on the floor. Then she opened her mouth and what came out was not a formal petition. It was the prayer of someone who had counted what she had and found nothing.

An Orphan Begging From Window to Window

She told God directly: I dwell in the king's palace alone, without father or mother. Like an afflicted orphan begging charity from house to house, so do I beg for Your mercy, from one window to the other in the palace of King Ahasuerus.

The image is precise and unmerciful. She is a queen describing herself as a beggar. She is a woman with access to the most powerful man in the known world describing herself as having no access to anything that matters. Her parents were dead. Mordecai was outside the gate in sackcloth and could not enter. The other Jewish people were fasting and unable to help her. She had been elevated to a position of extraordinary proximity to power and the proximity had left her alone in a way that a woman in the street could not have been, because at least a woman in the street could beg from window to window without risking death every time she crossed a threshold.

What She Said About the Crown

She told God she hated the sign of her greatness. The crown she wore when she appeared before Ahasuerus was an abomination to her. She had never worn it in private. She had never taken pleasure in the table of Haman or the king's feasts. She had never drunk the wine of the libations. She had kept herself separate from everything in that palace that was not hers. From the day she was taken until this day, she had found no joy in it.

This is the queen making her case. She is not asking for rescue because she is powerful or because she deserves it for being good. She is asking because she has nothing else to ask with. She has already given up everything she might have used to protect herself, and now she is lying on the floor with ash on her hair saying: You know what I am. You placed me here. I am asking You to see me from where I actually am, not from where the throne says I should be.

The God She Argued With

The prayer does not end with submission. Esther reminded God of the specific argument she intended to carry into Ahasuerus's hall: if I die, I die. But if I am to approach the king unsummoned, let me do it in a moment You open. Help my speech. The door I am about to walk through can only be opened from the inside, and I cannot open it from where I am standing.

She lay on the floor for three days. On the third day, she put on the royal garments again. She walked to the inner court. Ahasuerus looked up from his throne and saw her and extended the golden scepter. She touched its tip. The petition could now begin.

What Three Days on the Floor Produced

Three days of fasting and prayer produced a woman who walked into the inner court looking like a queen and feeling, by her own account, like an orphan. The two things were both true simultaneously. The garments were real. The desolation was real. What she had learned on the floor was that the garments could carry her into the room and the desolation could carry her prayer, and that neither one had to cancel the other for the plan to work. She needed the crown to get through the door. She needed the prayer to have anything worth saying once she was inside. The three days on the floor were the preparation that made the crown useful rather than merely decorative.