Esther 10:1-3 reads: And the king Ahasuerus laid a tribute upon the land and upon the isles of the sea. And all the acts of his power and of his might, and the declaration of the greatness of Mordecai, whereunto the king advanced him, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia? For Mordecai the Jew was next unto king Ahasuerus, and great among the Jews, and accepted of the multitude of his brethren, seeking the wealth of his people, and speaking peace to all his seed.
Before 1935, the name Iran was unknown to most of the world. An old moniker among certain people of the region, it dates to a thousand years or so before the time of Christ, and it means Aryan. To most of the world, for all of those years, it was known by the very different name of Persia, so named from the region of the people of Persis. In Scripture, that is the name that is used of it. Under that name, both in the scriptural and the secular historical record, Persia was a magnificent empire, not merely a singular country. Just in the days of Ahasuerus (elsewhere called Xerxes), Esther 1:1 tells us that the empire stretched “from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and seven and twenty provinces.” That is roughly 4,000 miles from one end to the other and encompassed approximately 100 million people.
The primary religion was Zoroastrianism, which held sway for more than a thousand years. Unlike many of the religions of the day, it was monotheistic rather than polytheistic.
In the days of Ahasuerus, there was a large Jewish population in the Persian Empire. Many who had been taken captive into Babylon during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar chose to stay when Babylon fell to the Medes and the Persians rather than go home to Israel. For their children and grandchildren, Babylon/Persia was home, the home they had been born into, the only one they had ever known.
As the Book of Esther unfolds, we find a series of events that today would be (sadly) unthinkable. We find a young Jewish woman becoming the queen of the Persian Empire. Haddassah, the Myrtle, becomes Esther, the Star. Think of that: a Persian/Iranian king and a Jewish queen! Later on in the book, the second in command to Ahasuerus, a wicked man named Haman, tries to exterminate every Jew on Earth. The response of the Persian/Iranian king, once he realizes what is happening, is to allow the Jews to fight back against his own people and save their lives. As the book comes to a close, we find the verses I began this column with showing Esther’s aged cousin, a Jewish man named Mordecai, taking the place of Haman as second in command of the empire.