Esther | Michael Manasco | Week 02

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us [email protected] be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast, Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you. [00:00:37] Speaker B: All right, so we're going to go and continue our study of Esther tonight. We're going to continue. As I said when I started this class, one of the exciting things for me about Esther is the time period. So for me there's just so much and now that I have a quarter to do it, I wanted to let it breathe and really take last week and this week too, to let more of the historical context out and try to do a better job that if I can, to get get some of these things up here to so we can talk through our evidences and a few more things, review a couple of things I said last week, had some requests to put a couple of things back up just to look at again and then move on to some more. So I want us to explore that tonight as we're going to continue looking at setting the scene for Esther tonight. As we get started, we talked about some themes of Esther and a lot of people brought up humility, bravery, things like that. And one thing I want us to think about tonight is the concept of great when we think of great people and what greatness is. And I would say Esther is a book full of greatness. And I want to open with another question tonight and I'm going to turn it over to you once more and ask you to discuss if you're by yourself, sit and meditate on it or turn around. But I'm going to ask you to at least talk to your neighbor, your spouse, someone with you. And I'd like for you to talk, even if you don't talk back to me. I want you to have the opportunity to meditate on these questions. I want you to think for a moment, what is one person from history that you think of whenever you hear so and so? The great or so and so is a great man. So and so is a great woman. And I want you to think about why they were called that. So I'm going to give you a moment. I'd like you to talk to one another and tell each other what comes to mind. Who do you think of and why? So I'll give you a moment. So in the interest of time, I'll ask to reflect a little on that. Anybody want to share with me or not? We'll move on and I'll give you some. But share. What are you thinking? What comes to mind? Anybody want to tell me who do you think of from history that's known as the great? Who comes to mind? Alexander the Great. There's the big one. Who else? Ronald Reagan. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And here people say a great man for different reasons. Great communicator. Okay. There's an. Yeah, there's always a qualifier. Okay. Great communicator. Why was Alexander great? Why do we call him that Conqueror? Conquering makes us great. But that is why. That's one of the reasons that's a subject to talk to historians. The concept of great, does it have anything to do with morality? Maybe not. I've heard some people say that that term from historians point of view really doesn't. Right. You might look at somebody who did something brave like Rosa Parks or someone who stands up for something or whether normal or high in a position. You wouldn't say they're great because they're more than that. Right? They're more than what we call in history. Great means something by human standards. Any other greats that come to mind? Herod one of the Herods. Why was Herod the Great one of the Herods? He was great. He built lots of things. He was great. He built lots of things. Anybody else? And there are several we hear from history. We're talking about some in our text tonight. And moving on throughout the quarter. Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, Xerxes the Great, they all called themselves that or were called that. Did they earn it? That's up for history. But greatness is something that we see a lot of these great people from history. Now moving on to some text, we think about greatness in the Bible. I know this hopefully comes to mind. God is great. Right. We talk about greatness definitely along a different scale. Psalms 145 tells us great is the Lord and most worthy of praise. His greatness no one can fathom. So he has a greatness that is beyond what we can even perceive. Right. It's more than that. So really quickly, if anybody kind of Rhetorical. But if anybody wants to answer, how are we taught to be great in the Bible? What comes to mind? Or are we. Is that a bad word? Are we taught to be great in the Bible? Does anything come to mind? Being a servant is great. Yeah, he did. The greatest is the one. Yes. There was another comment by being humble. Yeah. The flip side, right? So that kind of, you know, where our head goes. And that's true. We see in Matthew, Jesus summoned them and said, you know, the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them. And the great ones make their authority over them felt Great ones make their authority felt right. From a people standpoint, we certainly see that with our characters in Cass and Esther in the form of Xerxes. But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great will be your servants. Right. We're going to see, I think, different characters in Esther maintain that role. I want to point out a couple things as we get into this, because tonight, in the time we have tonight and next week, we'll be covering part of Esther, but especially Xerxes. Okay? I love Xerxes. I love the character of Xerxes. I don't approve of Xerxes, but I love talking about this character because it's funny how Esther. It's chapter two before we mention Esther's name. You ever notice that? And so to me, this is inspired word. It is inspired word. And it's interesting in telling us something when God gives us a whole chapter about Xerxes, what he's doing, and Vashti, his queen. This is kind of a funny thing, and I think this is interesting. This tells us who he is, things we know about Xerxes. And he did call himself the Great and was referred to that because his father was great and his grandfather was great. Xerxes, not so much in his own mind, maybe he did do a lot of great things in the world. But this was an inscription found at the Van fortress, high up on a mountain in what's called the Satrapy of Armenia. We're going to read that tonight. Satrapy is a province, okay? This is how they divided their kingdom. And this is an inscription Xerxes had put on there verbatim, translated, I am Xerxes the great king, the king of kings, Persian kings. This is where that originates, the concept of king of kings. We tend to give that title to someone else, deservedly so, our savior. But from a humanity standpoint, Persia is one of the first, really the first empire to get this idea of kingliness. I am the king of kings, right, they psalms of that. He says I am the great king, king of kings, King of all kinds of peoples with all kinds of origins. Kings of this earth great and wide. The son of King Darius the Achaemenid. And then below that, and this is not me saying, he actually had it written on there to show us he had an ego. He wrote the words king Xerxes says King Darius, my father by the grace of Ahura Mazda built this, what is good. And he gave orders to dig this knee shout. But because he doesn't make an inscription, I ordered that to be made. That was me. And he did this around the kingdom. And it's funny because he would write, by the way, this is me saying that he had a bit of an ego and he had some daddy issues, I'm going to put it that way. He really did. Xerxes suffered from some insults and generational trauma, we might say. I'm not trying to make excuses for him, but Xerxes is a man that shows us how dangerous a man can be, particularly in power who has thin skin, has a little too much to drink and has all the wrong people around him. Right, we're going to see that. A couple other things we know about Xerxes is we're going to see him in verse 1. These were common in the Achaemenid Empire, which is. Achaemenid empire is another word for Persia, Persian Empire. They had images of the kings fighting lions a lot. There's a lot of mythological reasons for it but that was something symbol of pride. They would overcome these powerful lions and see themselves as lions and often they would have Xerxes or Darius single handedly beating a lion by hand to hand combat. Xerxes had these. This is one from his harem in Persepolis. Xerxes had images in his harem so all the women would see how awesome he was. He had a lot of these very machismo type things in there where it was him single handedly wrestling a lion to show his virility. Right, he would show that. And there is an inscription. He kept an inscription. They discovered this in his harem in each of his palaces, all three of the main ones. So the women would see this every day just to brag on himself and he would say Darius had other sons. But thus was, by the way, Ahura Mazda was their version of God. They were Zoroastrians, if you ever hear that term. They very much were kind of monotheistic. They didn't believe in Yahweh but they believed in good and evil. They believed there was a good and there was an evil. Now, how they define that is definitely not Christian, but they believed in that. They didn't really have gods. They adopted gods from the Babylonians. They were doing what the Romans did before. The Romans made it cool, right? The Romans adopted and stole everybody's culture and said, we don't care what you do as long as you pay taxes. Persians did it first and they were really lackadaisical with it, but they referred to God. He says, darius made me the greatest after himself. When my father Darius went away from the throne by the grace of Ahurimaza, I became king of my father's throne. And he goes on to talk about all the things he did. The thing about that is I highlight that because I mentioned to you last week that the first thing a Persian boy was taught when they were five years old was to shoot a bow, ride a horse and tell the truth. Oh, they loved the truth. They said they loved the truth, but boy, did they lie. Okay, whenever it was convenient. That phrase is doing a lot of word. When Darius went away from the throne, Darius was assassinated, most likely. There were a lot of palace intrigue going on. Xerxes wasn't innocent. That sort of thing popped up, as a matter of fact. And I will reference some of these throughout the class, but I'll pull out these histories like Herodotus and Josephus, but essentially, well, I can just give you the idea. But when Darius dies, it's recorded that Xerxes was one of Darius sons, but he wasn't in line for the throne. But Darius had Xerxes after he became king and had the other kids when he was just a noble. Right. So Xerxes says, I was born when you already had the crown on, so I should be king. He had a way with words too. He was very good at that sort of thing. That's something we need to keep in mind about Xerxes. So a couple things about this quarter as we go through. I want us to remember some things I put up before we're going to look at some evidences. Think about that idea of symmetry with these characters. It's a chiastic book. We see these reflections throughout. The themes of Esther, exile and redemption, queen and a queen, a party and a party. And we need to be sure by the time we read Esther 1, we understand the Persians rule supreme. So what's in the name? I want us to look a little bit. We're going to go ahead and read Esther 1, I want us to read verses 1 to 9. I'm not going to put it on screen. I'm just going to read from my translation if you want to read from yours. But Esther 1 1, 9, we'll go ahead and read this and then set some context. And I want us to think about Xerxes, specifically in Vashti now, in the days of Ahasuerus the Ahasuerus, who reigned from India to Ethiopia over 127 provinces in those days, when King Ahasuerus sat on his royal throne in Susa, the citadel, in the third year of his reign, he gave a feast for all his officials and servants. The army of Persia and Media and the nobles and governors of the provinces were before him, while he showed the riches of his royal glory and the splendor and pomp of his greatness for many days, 180 days. And when these days were completed, the king gave for all the people present in Susa the citadel, both great and small, a feast lasting for seven days. In the court of the garden of the king's palace, there were white cotton curtains and violet hangings fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rods and marble pillars, and also couches of gold and silver on mosaic pavement of porphyry, marble, mother of pearl and precious stones. Drinks were served in golden vessels, vessels of different kinds, and the royal wine was lavished according to the bounty of the king, and drinking was according to this edict. There is no compulsion, for the king had given orders to all of his staff to the palace to do as each man desired. Queen Vashti also gave a feast for the women in the palace that belonged to King Ahasuerus, who was Xerxes. And we'll get to that in a minute, but stopping there and tonight next week, just these first nine verses. There's a lot we need to do. Looking at this and to remind you guys, just from last week I showed this quickly, won't linger on it, but this book is chiastic, meaning it reflects themes. We're going to start with this lavish description. We start with a banquet and a queen and we're going to end with a banquet and a queen. Totally different place though these sorts of themes come together. Everything culminates in Haman's plan and then everything flips on its head. This is a book of plot twists. So a couple of things aside from our biblical text. I like to mention Herodotus a lot. Herodotus tells us a lot and we have a lot we owe him about what we have today, Herodotus, for those of you who are history fans, he's kind of called the father of history. Okay. And the reason is he was the first guy to really write history the way we do it now. He was the first guy to really say, maybe I should go on site and get a first hand account. And we don't just have boring lists. He wrote it in a narrative way. Right. But he was, he lived during the time of Xerxes. So he's very much a first hand source. He's credited with inventing history. It tells us a lot about Persia, Xerxes and the queens. That's in quotes because unfortunately English fails us and they have a lot of words for that. But just to recount where we're at, because I want us to remember it's not just one period of exile. Right. Couple of quick things we've got about from 9:30 when the kingdom falls. We're not going to go over all that, but we essentially have the split kingdom. Right. Israel and Judea, Israel and Judah. We're going to go from 9:30 to 4:80 B.C. when our story starts. We've got about 500 years where exile and back, exile and back. Right. Of a lot of things happen. And again, and I want to point this out because we need to have confidence that we can show evidences for all these times. And it leads right up to Esther. And I mentioned this. This is one of the big ones. Someone asked me to put this up again. This is from the black obelisk of Shalmaneser. I think it's in the British Library where we see evidence saying, yep, this is when Jehu from the line of Omri talks about all that from 2 Kings 8:25 BC we see them fall. Israel falls as a vassal state to Assyria. The keynotes. I want us to remember as we kind of bullet point in to Esther. We have the Assyrians fighting against the Judeans in about 700 B.C. so King Sennacherib, we have evidence. Not going to go into all that right now, but we have biblical evidence that matches history. The Babylonians, we need to remember who these people are. Someone mentioned last time, the Babylonians and Medes, those people kind of kind of together. Nomadic peoples as well. This is when Nineveh falls and the Assyrians get crushed in 612. The Israelites essentially are trading tyrants. Right. I mentioned this last time briefly, just not to dwell on too much. But we have evidence from this king in Assyria in 2nd Kings Tiglath Pileservice and that matches the various Assyrian Annals. We have the annals being the documents and tablets that even indicate the kings from the Bible. Hoshea is in there. Okay, we can see all this. We can follow all the way up. We have a lot of evidence from 800 BC to 400 BC. It's out there. You just can't deny it. If you do, you're just being dishonest. We can't do that. The Taylor prism in the British Museum. I want to see this one day, you know, and I'll live vicariously through several of you get do that. But in Second Kings, this is a big one. That again, getting closer. We're getting closer. We see the last king of Israel, Hoshea, in about 722, 732, actually conspires with the Egyptians, the ancient enemies. Right. We have historical evidence too, aside from Second Kings, where there's the quote from there below where it talks about this guy, Hoshea is king. And they make Babylon angry. And the Babylonians then sack. We always talk about this sacking the Assyrians and what's left of the Israelites. This is where we get a little closer. 6:12, the Assyrians fall. Nebuchadnezzar, you've heard of him, Maybe Nebuchadnezzar pops up in the text and we have a lot of evidence on him where he sacks Jerusalem in about 600. There were actually two sieges. Okay. 586 BC is the one where they really get it. That's where Nebuchadnezzar really hammers Jerusalem, burns the temple. Get out. Right now we're slaves. Now we've done it. That's where the Israelites and Jewish people are. Second kings. Read it for yourself. Second kings 25 dates it perfectly. The math is perfect. Tells us what year the king reigned. It matches. Perfect wonder. I love it. Right. We have things like the Jehoiakim Chronicles, which are cuneiform they discovered with King Jehoiakim, where it's basically a receipt where it's showing the king rationing while they're being sieged. You know, little evidences that matches the Jerusalem Chronicles that talks about Nebuchadnezzar saying, yes, I sacked Jerusalem in this year. So we have a first wave of a sack here in 606. A second wave comes in, people are deported. We start reading about Daniel and all these other things in the Bible. 586 is the big one. Jerusalem goes down. Okay, that's the quick and dirty version. 6th century. This is where we come into our plot, okay, about 100 years prior, not quite 70 years, Cyrus the Great Cyrus in Persia. What we know is Persia. You'll see it called the Achaemenid Empire. That's because it's kind of funny how the Greeks are the ones who recorded all this, right? The Persians didn't do a good job. And there's a reason for that. They thought they were great in the Persian text. What we know from Persians is they thought they had solved history. The only thing we have from them is they basically were like, we conquered everybody. We have set the bar as how it's going to go. Why write it down? You write about us, the Greeks would write about it. It was kind of a bizarre time. So a lot of our stuff from Persia is all architecture, right? But what we do know is that the Persians started. Cyrus was from a family called the Achaemean family that lived in a region of Iran called Persis. Okay? And that kind of came from that. But the Greeks, arrogant as they were, thought, ah, they're kind of connected to us. They're from Perseus, from our legend. That's Perseus. So they thought Persians were like of them. The Greeks kept trying to find a way to say, we're like you. They weren't. But Egypt is going to fall to Persia and that's important for us to know. There is no Egyptian superpower. Egypt is crushed. At this point, I need us all to understand that Persia is in charge. Persia is now established as an empire. Cyrus the Great leads quite a great military campaign. He conquers Egypt, officially. He smashes Babylon, which is good for the Jews. This is why the Jews love Cyrus and they should. You'll see literature about it because he was the great liberator. Talk about great. By all accounts, he did some things, like most of them that were terrible. But he also was a great liberator. He liberated them. Roman Republic is founded. And this is where the Greeks start talking about dangerous words like democracy, the demas. That was a big change too, because at this point, everyone was just accepting the empire. Somebody's got to rule. Might as well be the Babylonians, might as well be the Persians. The Greeks started to push back, say, maybe we want to rule differently. That causes some conflict here on a major scale. And we have evidence of King Darius, Cyrus Son. And I point this out because I want to talk about him and Xerxes together. The Persians, when they took you over, they didn't even do like the Romans. They were really cool about what you Did. They would take on your clothes, they would marry your people, they would just take your culture on and say we're all assimilated. As long as you pay your taxes, we don't really care. We don't believe in gods anyway. Right? They really didn't for the most part. What they did believe were Babylonian leftovers. Okay? But we see Darius, we have evidence from Egypt where he installed himself as both the Persian emperor and the pharaoh of Egypt. In their way, you couldn't help but assimilate them. So in the fifth century, when we're in this text and we can date this in verse 1 to 480 B.C. in a few ways. First of all, in the 5th century we have these big things happening in the world. I mentioned this briefly last time. Around the world we have Confucianism, Buddhism, all these things are taking off. So this is not a homogenous world. Word's getting around by all these religious traditions. Xerxes is going to slide in and take over in 486 and down there is just a small version of his great inscription he would put in his harem later. So an important date to remember is in 550 BC Cyrus officially establishes this empire, the land of Perseus. And some of you mentioned Alexander the Great. And I just want us to see this too because, you know, we often talk about how long our country's been around and we hope it stands. But we need to remember, we need to remember all these great empires. Couple hundred years. Couple hundred years. A couple hundred years, right. For various reasons would fall and God was at work through all of them, even Alexander the Great. And we do see him later. That's really the only time Persia actually falls. Persia's going to rule for a long time, up until 330bc I believe. When Alexander the Great comes in, Alexander of Macedon crushes them. And then we kind of have a period of silence. But thanks to Esther, God's people are where they need to be and we get to the Romans and Jesus is born. So we have this time period leading up. I mentioned this briefly last time, Cyrus, when he conquers Babylon. One thing to remember and think about this when you read Esther, you know, he had a concubine, he had concubines, he had harems. But it was a very inclusive culture in that they just kind of anything went right. But they weren't like the Greeks. The Greeks didn't like them because the Greeks would say the best way to be is to be Greek like us. And if you're not born here. You're not one of us. So you can't understand it. You need to learn our Greekness. Whereas the Persians were like, we're just going to take everything you do and make that ours. And that went okay for some people. And it's also why in 539 BC we see that Cyrus made the Cyrus cylinder. And that right there might be the single most important piece of evidence we have, because we know it was written in 539B.C. 538B. And that is the date that matches the biblical chronological account when the Jews were freed. But often we skip over. Cyrus was kind of a human rights guy. He invented. He sort of established not just the Jews, but he said, you can all go home. He conquered Babylon and said, if you want to go home, that's fine. You want to stay here, that's fine. A lot of Jews stayed. Now the question now becomes, were the Jews who stayed wrong to stay? They didn't all go back home, right? There's kind of some stuff going on here because they have the right to go home now. A lot of them don't. It's going to get us to. Esther, a couple things I want us to keep in mind. Maybe you didn't know. Just I want us to appreciate the Persians. They gave us everything. They gave us our postal system, a lot of things we have that set up. And I put this here because I want you to see how this influenced how God worked with them. The road systems they built, the royal road system that eventually we would see the Silk Road. And all these things combined that we see Romans build on top of that gave us the route for the apostles to take. It's not coincidence, people. You know, this is providence at work. But the famous phrase from our postal system, what is it? Neither snow nor rain nor Chad's in here. He'll correct me. You know, nothing's going to stop it. That's where this comes from. Persia. They had this motto back then. If you go way back, they kind of had this, hey, Herodotus says nothing in the world is going to stop these Persian couriers. They invented that system. They were the first people to tax people. We might say boo to that or yay. But they were the first people to make a taxable system where you weren't just a slave, you were part of the system. A lot of people liked that. This was kind of new at this point, really was. So that offered something. And here's a brief snapshot of the empire I want us to Remember, this is modern day Iran. This is a snapshot Iran. And this is the Persian Empire. It's a big place. Esther 1, we just read 127 satrapies or provinces ranging from India over here to Libya. And it checks out. There's a map of some of the roads. Still hard to see, I know, but we want to remember this in Esther 1. This is where our story's at the palace of Susa or Shusha or Shushan. You'll see this in the sources. Same place, but we see they maintain several palaces. Persepolis is his big one. That's the main palace of Xerxes. He takes on Susa as his winter palace. That's where our story takes place. And he kept Babylonia, kept a seat of power on those pesky Babylonians, just in case. Right? Got to keep that boot on him just a little. And we'll see his military campaigns take us up to Sardis, Smyrna and all these places. Getting to Greece, you know, growing up, most of the maps, we focus on Greece a lot over here. But Persia was the center of the world at this point. Greece was kind of. There is no Greece right now. Just remember that. It's just a bunch of city states. Just a bunch of city states. They're just now learning about what Greece is. And there's Rome, there's a little boot. We don't worry about them yet. And the Persians didn't worry about them yet either. What were they going to do? That's to come later. We can't forget Daniel. We won't look at all this. But I want us to remember, if you look this up yourself in Daniel 1:1 and 10:1 we can prove here. As we get into the exodus that got us here, we have Daniel, who's known as Belteshazzar, given a Babylonian name. Remember that. The Persians did adopt that. Okay. Which is why Esther is not Esther's name. Mordecai, I don't think is Mordecai's name. I don't know that we know what it is, but I'll tell you why I think it's Mordecai. And I think we can see they kind of kept that take on the names of our gods. We're going to take your identity a little bit. But we see Daniel verify all this. We see him date Nebuchadnezzar. We see him date at the end. Daniel lives all the way to see King Cyrus take over. Leadership has changed, but God's in charge now. Some of you may have Seen this before, Daniel 11:2. And this is getting us right up to tell us what's going to happen. Some of you may have read this verse 11:2 and there's a couple of ways to take this. Talking about the four kings prophecy or the four lands. And this is Daniel, I think maybe some of you disagree, but the evidence in Daniel, he's talking about the coming empires, the coming kingdoms, the Persians, the Babylonians, Romans. But here he's talking about the next kings. And this matches history. It does. He says, I tell you the truth, three more kings will arise in Persia. This is after Cyrus is in charge, right? And then a fourth who will be far richer than the others. When he has gained power, he's telling everybody when he's gained power with his wealth, he will stir up everyone against the kingdom of Greece. And then a mighty king will arise who will rule with great power and do as he pleases. After he has arisen, his empire will be broken up and parceled out to the four winds. So I think in sort of time in the auditorium, I'll tell you what I think. I think it matches history pretty well. Those three kings after Cyrus, Cambyses, his son ruled after Cambyses was a guy named Smerdis, had another name too. And then Darius rules. There's your three kings, the fourth one that pops up and it says he will be far richer than the others, gains his wealth and stirs up problems against Greece. That's Xerxes. If it's something else, it's something else. But it perfectly matches. Daniel's telling us what's about to go down. And he's rocked. Xerxes does things with his empire his father never did or could because Xerxes kind of has his feelings hurt. Okay, for a couple things in a little bit. After he has arisen, his empire broken up. So this even talks about Alexander the Great at the end. He is eventually going to smash Xerxes empire. So we see these sort of predictions in the Bible that I think more than prophecy, it's prophesying truth here, right? It's not just some magical thing. It's telling us what's going to happen. One thing people were curious about, and I thought I'd put this up here, is when is this taking place in the context of the other books, Esther, Ezra and Nehemiah have some overlap. Just to give you a quick footnotes version we see in Ezra chapter 1 and chapter 4 and 6 about 539 BC. And then the other verses happen around 522 or 516, where we see Ezra acknowledge that Cyrus is king of Persia, and he acknowledges that the Exodus can go. We can go home. And they acknowledge that Darius is now in charge. So we see a timeline. Then Esther kind of happens right in 483 BC, takes up, we think over about 10 years or so, that Xerxes is in charge. That's going to be the bulk of our class from now on. And then we see. Jump back to Ezra, part of Ezra actually takes place because we see Artaxerxes mentioned. That's the son of Xerxes. I know, throwing a lot of names, but all the math matches is what I'm saying. We see Artaxerxes son, and that's true. That was his son's name. And then we get to Nehemiah, where the wall is built. Okay. And a couple of things about the wall or about archaeology. Some of you may have seen this before, but what I love about this is this really gets under the skin of somebody who really wants to show you that we can't prove it. This is an overlay of the palace at Shusha. We know that. We know where the palace at Susa is. And these points on here. We're not going to read every verse here, but you can trace. We're going to pull this up every chapter. You can trace the pathway Esther takes in this map. You can see where every bit in this palace was. See, we have the palace here, and it's been mapped out by archaeologists. And when you compare it to the Bible, it works. Esther 1, verse 5, where it talks about the audience hall. When we get to that, where he's having the gardens, it's up at the top there, the king's gate, where Mordecai was, where the gate of all nations, Xerxes called it was number two over there. The harem was a massive complex built on three there at the bottom that ran alongside, close enough to number five there, which is the throne room, so you can get to the king if you were called and so forth. So, you know, we have this where we can see even where the Bible tells us Haman wants to wait to speak to his king. So we have archaeological record. So I want to get to the names a little bit tonight, just at least. Xerxes. To clarify, I stand by 100% that Ahasuerus is Xerxes. Okay? There's different commentary. I'm not just saying absolutely not, but I really think it's hard to prove it is it? And that's because a Little bit of linguistics. Okay? And I'll tell you, it's because Persians, again, were bad at records. Even the Greeks had a hard time translating old Persian. We see that with Herodotus, with Thucydides, Theseus. Pick a name, pick any philosopher you pull off of the Greek section in a library. They were just doing their best transliterating words. But we know that Xerxes spelled that way. It's more of a Greek name for Ahasuerus. Ahasuerus in Hebrew was a Hebrew transliteration. I think my slide cut out a couple of letters there. But they wrote it a couple of ways. The Hebrews had a hard time with that Xerxes. They didn't really. Just didn't roll off the tongue. And the way they did it was they had this kind of. When they saw it, it was more like aha. They would say an Ah, an aleph, to move into it aswir. So they would transliterate it. There's some ancient copies of Esther that say Ahasvarosh, which is a little closer to Xerxes. I know it don't sound like it, but it's their way of sounding it out. Make sense? It was their way. The oldest Persian we have is Zarsha, or it was just Jarsha like that. You kind of hear it. So they heard it in modern Persian. Still not right. The linguistics weren't there, but it's the same guy. Ahasuerus is Xerxes because it matches other Hebrew. I'm not a Hebrew master, but had enough of it to know enough to be dangerous. That Ahasuerus is Xerxes. He was known as the Warrior, the Lion King. I'm not talking about Simba and Mufasa, but talk about an arrogant man. He did call himself the Lion King, and boy, did he show it again. He was real big. He was a big guy. Although it's funny. Herodotus tells us whenever he ran into another ruler, he was kind of a tall guy. But he would always write things. If it was a guy taller than him, he would say things like, that guy's almost as tall as I am. You know, he was comically. Nobody would tell him he was wrong, right? Xerxes. But he was. He's not, you know, he wasn't quite the guy, which. I'll show a slide in a minute. You've all seen Xerxes, probably online in a meme or in a movie. Maybe none of us should have watched, but I did. But we see his name here. And again, Herodotus backs it up. And I want to point this out. And tonight I just wanted to at least cover these first few verses going back to those first three we see the Bible tells us how big the empire was, where he was in the third year of his reign. If we go to historical sources, we don't even have to worry about that because we have history that says, oh, Xerxes started reigning in 486 BC not a mathematician like Ben, but 486 minus 3 is 483. Right. Okay, getting there in the third year is when this happens, when we start. So we know when it was, we know where it was. I showed you a picture of the palace at Susa. The military leaders of Persia and Media Medea, the Medes, the nomads, the princes and the nobles of the provinces were present. And this is where again, this proves the text is right because we can date it again. We know Xerxes reigned during this time. He died in 465 B.C. he was assassinated. He was the son of Darius I, which confirms it in 6:1 of Ezra, Darius, we see where he issues ordering the temple that dates it as well. If we work out the dates, it dates it to 538 BC when that happens and Ezra tells us again, yes, Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes. And so Xerxes, we mostly know him from this. Anybody want to shout out what is the battle of thermopylae in 480bc known for? What is that? 300. The 300 Spartans. Okay, and that's a bust of a Spartan on the left found at a site near there, dated from about 480 BC that's Xerxes in the middle. What we think he looked like, what the steles say. And, and those guys on the right are what were called his immortals, the immortal warriors. Right. Maybe you've heard of them now the movie looks more like that. Okay, everybody was asking me when that slide was coming. This was not quite the same, right? But Leonidas there on the left, the mighty Spartans. And you have Xerxes in the middle, portrayed a little differently than his actual statues, but probably saw himself that way. Very tall man, lots of jewelry and his immortals with these little masks. That's a Hollywood interpretation, not the truth, but they were formidable. So we know the battle of thermopylae happened in 480 B.C. so the question then I'll ask you think of this a second. Here's a small map in Esther 1:1. One of the biggest complaints I always heard growing up was this is how you know the Bible's wrong. It says he had 127 satraps. What's a satrap? What's a province? He didn't have that many. That's absurd. That's the Bible exaggerating again. Herodotus says he had 20. Have you ever heard that before? Maybe you haven't. Some people said, no, he has 30 by now. We'll give him 30. So what's the difference if it's 20 to 30? Why is there a discrepancy, you think? Anybody want to weigh in? Why is there such a discrepancy? Is the Bible wrong? What do you think? I'm kind of just fishing to see if anybody's ever read on this before. You don't have to know. That one is. But the thing I want us to take away is we do know because we can cross reference Daniel. Daniel 6:1 tells us in Darius reign he was able to appoint 120 satraps throughout his kingdom. A satrap is the governor. The satrapy is what they govern. Problem is the language. Secular historians love this because they'll pick on that word and hope you don't notice. But I'm way too stubborn for that. It's a bad translation because we know in Hebrew, if you actually look at the interlinear text, they say 127 medinas, which are small administrative groups. Think about 30 states with four counties apiece. That makes sense. They're more like counties. They're small administrative groups happy to have discussion with anybody that has a different view. But what we have here and we see in Esther, it uses a different word later called ashpurdine, which is a translation of satrap. When they are addressing the governors, when Xerxes says, yes, tell all the governors, the Jews can fight back, right? That's different in Persian. It's a word we can't pronounce, but it's kind of the idea. Does that make sense? So when it says 127 satrapies, it's 127 satrapies. Because if you look at how many divisions all 30 of Xerxes satrapies had, it works out to about 4 or 5 appears so don't let people fool you with that. We also confirm the time we have try to mention this, the feast for war preparations, the gathering of nobles in 483 B.C. in verse one, where we see that, right, he has everyone together for a party. We know in history at this point in time, Herodotus says Xerxes gathered his army his military people and his buddies, they had a party for 180 days. Okay? It was a military campaign. Esther 1, 35 tells us that. And I don't know quite have time for that now, but I will reference one thing, this one, I had to bring my books. So this is a copy of Herodotus histories, by the way. So in seven, let's see, we have a correlation here that makes the Bible work aside from faith, but it does make it work. There's a military campaign that talks about a history to put down revolts in Egypt before he goes to Greece to finish what his father started. Herodotus tells us there's an army. Because in 483 BC, we have Herodotus saying as soon as Egypt was taken in about 482 BC, he comes back home. Xerxes takes the first step toward the war on Athens. He calls a conference, which is translated banquet, okay, of the noblest Persians, so that he might hear their opinions and make his wishes plain in hearing them all. And it goes on more and more. But there are pages and pages in history that tell us he had a big banquet mainly because of bad advice. And we'll get to more of that next week. But the main thing, he has a banquet, and he has his nobles around him who are urging him on to take Greece. Okay. And I think that's the place we'll stop tonight. I want you to think about these dates, I guess, very quickly, Esther two, when we get there, it even dates the seventh year of his return to Persia. We have historical evidence that Xerxes, after his first campaign in Greece, comes back and he goes to his palace in Sardis, and he winds up in Susa when he comes home to his queen, Esther, after his failed military campaign. And Herodotus tells us this isn't the first time it's happened. When he got beat, he ran home to wine and women. Okay? And we even have at least one other account where a pretty face made him happy. And he literally tells her in the histories, I'll give you anything you want up to half the kingdom. Sound familiar? That's going to happen in Esther. Happened before. He was an easy mark. Okay, thank you for your time. We'll pick up here next week.