So we got an interesting conundrum this week, right? We're working through the middle part of Esther Chapter 9.

It's a part of the book where we see how the

sausage is made. It was really fun to Children's Book of Fy, the Book of Esther,

and to go through all the stuff where she's brave and beautiful and cunning and shrewd and the

clown king is duped and worked over into doing the right thing after he got duped and worked

over into doing the wrong thing and then the Jews just

vaguely they just win and they don't die and it's great and Haman he just dies and that's just he got his come up and that's fun but when you actually look at it and

think about it you see that the means by which they win and what it would take for them to truly secure victory in this

moment in history and in this political environment? Well, it's pretty jarring.

I mean, it's one of those deals where everybody likes a good steak, but nobody wants to date the butcher. That's not true. I've got a great friend who's a butcher and he has a lovely wife. That saying doesn't work for me at all.

Nah, everybody likes the sausage but not many people want to see how the sausage is made.

I think that one was a little bit better. The point is to achieve true

political victory to ensure the survival of her people what we're discovering as we

think carefully over these last few days about Esther chapter 9 and how this

all actually practically works out. It's ugly. It's ugly. It was an ugly

situation and it got an ugly solution and in an age of moral equivalency

where all things are just kind of equal and there isn't any sort of good or bad, it would make our

compasses spin about this thing. In the moral age that we're reading about here in the fifth century BC it's just

it's presented as unequivocally good it's assumed that the audience would look at

what we're reading about and say, well yeah, I mean how else are you going to win that?

You would have to defeat every single person with any access to this highly manipulatable king

who would want to kill the Jews

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