Welcome to the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Right now, we're going through the entire Bible

to understand it as one big cohesive story. We're covering one book each day, and this

one is about Esther.

I love the book of Esther. This is one of my favorites in the whole Bible. And I don't

say that at the expense of anything else in the Bible. Obviously, I really like the whole

thing. I mean, look what we're doing here as an exercise. But this one has a little different

feel to it because it's just a straight up story. And it is a great story. It has all

of the elements of all the great stories that you and I love and that transcend genre and

that transcend culture and language and region time. This is one of the all time greats.

Even if there's no Bible, even if hypothetically that didn't exist, I still think Esther would

be a great all time classic story because of how perfectly structured it is. It's got all

the elements. It's got a neat tidy beginning and middle and end. You can follow the flow of the

story. You can feel the tension, eb and flow at a perfect pace. It's got colorful, vibrant,

compromised characters who you can relate to and you can understand their motives, but they've

also got a degree of unpredictability and multifacetedness. It's got a strong lead character

who just happens to also be a strong female lead character. That makes it stand out from a lot of

other ancient literature. But rather than her being some kind of simplistic Mary Sue,

who just sort of feels like a lecture to the audience for not liking shows that feature women

quite enough, instead, we get a dynamic, complicated, compromised character here who has issues

that are external to her, but also issues that are internal to her that she has to overcome.

That's a character you can relate to. Frankly, people who write stories today could probably

use to take a few notes on how to properly write a female character from what we're seeing here in

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