We're listening to the 10 minute Bible hour podcast where we do fast, fun, free daily deep dives into books of the Bible.

And right now, we're going through Esther.

All right, I'm pulling back the curtain here.

Here's exactly what my plan was coming out of our last conversation.

I was thinking, all right, we just

finished up the book of Esther or the text of it at least. We've considered

how people would have thought about this era, the Xerxian era that Esther feels like a slice right out of the

middle of and then I teased at the end of our last conversation that now we should

probably go and look at some of the

legends and myths and expanded versions of the story that cropped up over the years

not because they might be true. No, they're clearly not true and even the people who put them forward knew they weren't true.

Rather, it's fan fiction, it's riffing on the story and that tells us about how people in different parts of the world and at different times have read and internalized this story,

how the story has pushed them, how parts of the story have agitated them,

how parts of this story have caused them to find hope or caused them to read meaning into this

that kind of fits with their moment I don't want to take a ton of time on that, but that is still something

that I think we need to consider before this is done, because how stories are interpreted at different

times is a huge part of what the story is and Esther is probably one of the most

open-ended to interpretation books in the whole Bible just because of how it's written.

There's very little instructive stuff, like, hey, everybody

ought to do this. There's very little exemplary stuff. Hey, be just like Mordecai, if you find out

about a plot against a public official official this is how you should handle it

there really isn't stuff like that it's a story and I think the story has some pretty

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