I think it would be fun today for us to talk about what we know about Esther and how it

fits into the Bible in terms of the nuts and bolts of the whole thing.

Right at the bat, we got a big question in that the book is anonymous.

It doesn't name who wrote the thing and indeed there's never been agreement on who wrote

the book of Esther.

They're real smart people who look at that through the centuries and they're like, you

know what, it just feels like this book was written by Mordecai, that's the cousin

and closest ally of Esther in the story.

There are other people who've looked at it and are like, ah, it kind of sounds like Ezra.

I bet Ezra wrote that and there's another tradition that says that elders gathered together

and they took the traditions and the versions that were out there and they codified that

into the one correct version of Esther.

And however it happened, just as a side note here, Christians are not threatened by any

of that.

Christians believe that all scripture is God breathed, that it is inspired by God, but

Christians do not believe that God somehow possesses the author and takes control of their

hand, stripping them of their humanity and their context to dictate a direct message

from God.

Moments like that in the Bible where it's held out as God directly relaying a message

with his own literal words, but the vast majority of the Bible looks like it was written

in conventional ways.

A person sat down and wrote something or a person did some research like Luke in the

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