Esther

Esther is set in the Persian empire, in the winter palace at Susa, under a king the book calls Ahasuerus and who is usually identified with Xerxes I. The Jews in the story are not in Jerusalem. They are the descendants of people carried off decades earlier who never went back, living as a minority in somebody else's capital, and the book is honest about how exposed that leaves them.

The plot runs on a series of banquets and a series of reversals. A queen refuses a summons and loses her position. A Jewish girl raised by her cousin is taken into the king's harem and ends up wearing the crown, having been advised to say nothing about who she is. A court official is offended by one man's refusal to bow and responds by obtaining a decree to kill every Jew in the empire. Then it turns, and it keeps turning, until the gallows built for one man is used for another.

The strangest thing about Esther is what is missing. God is never mentioned. Not once, in ten chapters. There is no prayer recorded, no prophet, no miracle, no voice from heaven. What there is instead is a run of coincidences so precise that the reader is clearly meant to notice: the right person in the right place, a sleepless night, a record read aloud at exactly the wrong moment for the man who wanted a favor. The book never tells you who arranged that. It shows you and lets you draw the line yourself.

The Jewish festival of Purim comes from this book and is still kept.

A caution before you start. Esther contains a forced marriage, a plotted genocide and a violent ending, and it does not soften any of it. Younger children will have questions, and some of the questions are good ones. The devotions here do not skip the difficult parts, but they do try to give you something to say.