Esther 10:1-3
Seeking the Good of His People
1Now King Xerxes imposed tribute throughout the land, even to its farthest shores.
2And all of Mordecai’s powerful and magnificent accomplishments, together with the full account of the greatness to which the king had raised him, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Media and Persia?
3For Mordecai the Jew was second only to King Xerxes, preeminent among the Jews and highly favored by his many kinsmen, seeking the good of his people and speaking peace to all his countrymen.
Berean Standard Bible
The book ends with a tax. King Xerxes imposes tribute throughout the land, out to its farthest shores, and Persia carries on being Persia. No reform follows the rescue. The empire is still an empire, run the same way and funded the same way, and the book does not tell us anything more about the king than that.
That is where it chooses to finish, which is not where a reader would have put the ending. Then it turns to Mordecai, and hands him over in an unusual way.
And all of Mordecai's powerful and magnificent accomplishments, together with the full account of the greatness to which the king had raised him, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Media and Persia?
Go and look it up, the sentence says. It points away from itself to a record kept somewhere else and treats that record as the fuller account, which is a modest thing for a book to say about its own hero.
There is something else in it. The Book of the Chronicles is where this story turned: a king could not sleep, a servant read him an old entry about a man who had saved his life, and everything moved from there. Now the same kind of book holds Mordecai's own account.
Then the last verse, which sums up a life in one sentence.
For Mordecai the Jew was second only to King Xerxes, preeminent among the Jews and highly favored by his many kinsmen, seeking the good of his people and speaking peace to all his countrymen.
He is still called Mordecai the Jew. It was the label read out to Haman as an accusation, and the book uses it unchanged as his title on the final page.
The measure the last line takes of him is not the rank. Being second in the empire gets a mention and the sentence moves past it. What it settles on is seeking the good of his people and speaking peace to all his countrymen. The man who would not stand up for Haman ends the book seeking good and speaking peace.
Hold the two halves of that ending together, because both are true. Xerxes is still king and Persia is still an empire. And the man who sat at the gate is now second in it, his people are alive who were sentenced to die, and he is using what he has for their good.
There is no temple here, no return to Jerusalem, and no mention of God anywhere in ten chapters. A Jewish exile in a foreign court, using the place he had been given.
How We Know
The book closes by pointing outside itself.
Esther 10:2 sends the reader to the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Media and Persia for the full account of Mordecai's career, describing it as a record separate from this one.
Esther 2:23 recorded the assassination plot in the royal chronicles, and Esther 6:1 has that same record read aloud to the king.
So the chronicle works inside the story and is then cited at the end of it. A book that treats a royal archive as the place its details are kept is consistent with a writer familiar with how such records were held. What that chronicle said we cannot check, and this note claims only that Esther directed its readers to one.
Questions
1 The book ends with the king imposing a tax. What has changed in Persia, and what has not?
AnswerThe empire is still an empire, still collecting, still run by Xerxes. What has changed is who stands second in it, and that a people who were sentenced to die are alive. The book gives us both and tidies neither away.
2 Where does the book send us for the rest of Mordecai's story?
AnswerTo the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Media and Persia. It points away from itself to a record kept somewhere else, and calls that the fuller account.
3 What is Mordecai still called in the last verse?
AnswerMordecai the Jew. It was the thing said about him when Haman went looking for a reason to kill a nation, and the book uses it as his title on the final page.
4 The last line says he sought the good of his people and spoke peace to all his countrymen. If somebody summed you up in one line, what would you want it to say?
AnswerSomething along the lines of: that I sought the good of the people around me and used what I had to bring peace. Mordecai's line mentions his rank and then moves straight past it to what he did with it.
What This Means for Us
Esther records no return to Jerusalem and no rebuilt temple. It leaves Mordecai in the Persian court, working under a king it never tells us improved, and what it says about him at the end is that he sought the good of his people and spoke peace to all his countrymen.
Most of us serve God in places we did not design, among circumstances we do not control. It is not a complaint and it is not a sentence to be endured. It is the ordinary run of a life, and it was his.
Notice also what did change. His people were preserved, he was given real influence, and he spent it on them rather than on himself. So the question the last line of this book puts to us is a practical one: what good can we seek from the position we have right now?
Prayer
Father, thank you for a man who sought the good of his people from the place he had been given. We did not choose all our circumstances and we cannot control most of them. Show us the good we can seek here, and give us peace to speak to the people around us. Amen.