Hey, welcome back to a year in the Bible with Daily Grace. I am Shelby and I'm here with Scott.

Hey, Shelby. Scott, we've wrapped up Nehemiah and we're walking into the book of Esther today, which is super exciting.

We both really love this book. So it's going to be fun to talk through it for a few episodes.

I also just want to shout out the people who are leaving us reviews or comments. Those are

super encouraging. We just read one today from earlier in the Old Testament where someone said that

our explanations are really helping them understand Jesus as their great high priest and their

protection.

And I thought that was so cool. Maybe those are words that you've seen in the Old Testament

before, but you weren't sure how they actually applied to you. And so if you're learning

something, we'd love for you to do the same. Just leave a review or a comment. Let us know what

you're learning. That is so encouraging to us. But Scott, the book of Esther, jumping in, so excited. What do we need to know just kind of in general as we begin this book?

Okay. So you wrote The Daily Grace study on Esther. Yes. So you're familiar with this book. You love this book. You know already everything I'm about to say about Esther. But this book is amazing. Like it might be the most just all around exciting book in the Bible. Like it feels like a movie. It feels just very fast paced. There's a lot of irony and humor. There's a lot of dramatic reversals where you get the righteous being exalted and the wicked

punished, but to kind of just set the scene. So, you know, Babylon had conquered Southern Kingdom

of Judah, taken its population to exile. Persia, a few decades later, conquers Babylon,

and allows many Jewish people to return home to Jerusalem. And so, you know, but a lot of Jews did stay in exile, and that's where we find ourselves in the book of Esther.

This is the story of a group of Jews living in one of the capital seas of the Empire in Susa.

And it takes place about several decades after Persia allowed the first Jews to return home,

probably a little bit before Ezra Nehemiah, those events, but that's kind of a little bit of

the setting here. There's really four big characters in this book. You've got the Persian king,

Xerxes. Some translations call him a source. I'm going to stick with Xerxes. That's what he's going to say. Yeah. So he's a king. You've got Haman, who is a non-Persian, very high-ranking official. He's going to be the main antagonist here. You've got Mordecai, who is a Jew, and then Esther, who is Mordecai's cousin. Interestingly Interestingly though, there's one character who does not seem to be

present in this book, who is God, of course, which yeah, is really interesting for a book in the

Bible to never mention God. Yes. He's never mentioned, which is so interesting. However,

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