In the reign of the Persian king Xerxes in the mid-5th century BC, the call went out nationwide for a queen consort to replace Xerxes’ disgraced Queen Vashti, Esther 1:10-21.
It was Esther, the adopted daughter of Mordecai, “a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin” (2:5) who caught the king’s eye (9) and he crowned Esther “Queen instead of Vashti” (17). Esther was also Mordecai’s cousin (7), but had been taken in by Mordecai “as his own daughter when her father and mother died” (7). So – by both birth and adoption – Esther was related to Mordecai making her a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin too.
And what makes that significant is that Mordecai was a descendant of Kish (2:5), and so was King Saul (1 Samuel 9:1-2). So Esther being related to Mordecai meant that both of them could trace their ancestry back to the Benjamite King Saul – the same Saul who’d spared the life of the Amalekite King Agag (1 Samuel 15:9).
And it looks like some of Agag’s people may have survived too, because into Esther’s life 500 years later came “Haman the Agagite,” Esther 3:1. So here was a chap who could trace his ancestry back to Agag, and Agag was king of the Amalekites, the people God had told Saul to wipe out completely back in 1 Samuel 15.
So in Esther we have a Benjamite tracing her ancestry back to King Saul, and Haman tracing his ancestry back to the Amalekites that Saul should have totally destroyed. And now the reason God wanted the Amalekites destroyed becomes clear again, because Haman the Amalekite has the same vicious, sadistic attitude to Israel that his ancestors had.
When, for instance, Haman discovered “who Mordecai’s people were, he looked for a way to destroy all Mordecai’s people, the Jews, throughout the whole kingdom of Xerxes,” Esther 3:6. He even managed to convince the king “to send out couriers with dispatches to all the king’s provinces with the order to destroy, kill and annihilate all the Jews – young and old, women and little children on a single day and plunder their goods” (13). No wonder God ordered Saul and the Israelites to totally wipe out the Amalekites, because if they didn’t the Amalekites would want to do the same thing to them.
And now that time had arrived. But what Haman hadn’t taken into account was Mordecai also being a Benjamite and God’s preference for Benjamites as his weapon of war against the Amalekites. We’re about to see God, then, “Settling an old score”….(next blog)
