Today is the 18th day of August. Welcome to the daily audio Bible. I am Brian. It is wonderful to be here with you today as we gather again and take another step forward on the journey that we have begun.

The one that takes us from January 1st to December 31st. The one that takes us through the entire Bible.

And so here's what's going on. We finished the book of Nehemiah yesterday.

We are still reading through stories from exile, which brings us now to a new book, The Book of Esther.

And although this is a short book, we'll read this in a couple of days. It's a very high drama story.

The book of Esther will introduce us to a young Hebrew girl named Hadassah, and she was an orphan.

She was an orphan in exile in Persia, but her cousin Mordecai took her in and raised her as his own daughter, and Mordecai was an exile of the tribe of Benjamin.

And often these exiled Jews would take on more localized names. And so this Hebrew girl Hadassah was given the name Esther, which means star or morning star in Jewish tradition.

And from the Bible, we are told that Esther is staggeringly beautiful and possessed a quiet character.

And so when King Azurus, who was thought to be King Zerxes, sought to find a replacement for the queen that he had banished, her name was Vashdi, and we'll read all about that.

He ends up choosing Esther, although Esther has kept her ethnicity a secret.

Nobody knows that she's a Jew, and that proves to be huge in the story, because around the same time as a man named Haman, who had risen to prominence before the king.

And Haman was a descendant of King Agag of Amalek, and the Hebrews in the Amalekites had been at war with one another enemies of each other, dating all the way back to Jacob and Isah, and the prophet Samuel had executed King Agag after Saul defeated the Amalekites in battle.

And so we can see why Haman would have a hatred of the Jews, and as Haman rises to power in the kingdom, everyone has to bow to him, but more to guide the Jew won't bow before Haman, and all of this backstory gets re-ignited until Haman's hatred of the Jews is so profound that he patches a plot to do everything that he can to annihilate every Jew in the Persian Empire.

So what we have set up before us is a very, very high-ranking official in the kingdom of Persia, who wants to destroy the Jews from the kingdom while the king has a Jewish queen sitting on the throne.

And so there are great tensions here, a great struggle and a redemptive conclusion. The Book of Esther is now the basis for the festival of Purim for the Jewish people, and this was established, this festival of Purim was established in the Book of Esther by Mordeky.

And this story falls in the same time period that we've been reading about in Nehemiah, and the previous books that describe the exile.

There are a ton of parallels in the Book of Esther that we can look at and apply to our own lives, things that need to be taken apart, things that need to be remembered, that God will always show up.

That circumstances don't always dictate the outcome of something, and that everybody has an irreplaceable role to play for such a time as this, and that can be as big as the queen of an empire or as small as the friend that you know is going down right now.

Maybe you too are here for such a time as this, and with that we begin.

Esther, chapters 1, 2, and 3 today.

The following events happened in the days of Ahezurus. I am referring to that Ahezurus who used to rule over 127 promises extending all the way from India to Ethiopia.

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