Public life "for such a time as this"
Esther anticipates the risks and joys of ancient Christian secularity
Here’s a frequent Bible trivia question: “Which book of the Bible never mentions God?”
Esther, of course. The book of Esther makes other holy omissions: Torah, Israel, and covenant are missing, too.
Esther’s holy omissions, though, aren’t the only reasons why some sectarians find the book of Esther “fundamentally secular,” Robert Alter says.1 Walter Brueggemann and Tod Linafelt, for instance, point to the book’s lack of divine agency and wonder along with Jack Miles if the book suffers from “a jaded secularism.”
Esther’s secularism, Brueggemann and Linafelt claim, stems from the identity of the narrative’s agent. In Esther, God seems to take a back seat to people: “. . . history has now become a human enterprise wherein it is Jews, not the God of the Jews, who make the decisive difference.”2
Above: “Sydney Mardi Gras 2021” by Bruce Baker. Used by permission.
All this secularism sounds depressing, in a religious kind of way, until you read the book. Esther’s a riot. There’s strong evidence, Alter says, that Esther was written “primarily for entertainment.”
Esther’s hyperbole, reversals & “sly, sexual comedy”
A lot of the entertainment is at the Persian king’s expense. He bears the brunt of what Alter describes as the carnivalesque story’s significant amounts of “sly, sexual comedy.”3 The king misreads situations, too, at one point mistaking the groveling, prostrate Haman for his queen’s would-be rapist. The king’s cluelessness makes his constant reliance on his advisors’ directions seem reasonable, though pathetic.4
Hyperbole adds to the fun. The king’s banquet lasts six months, his decree divorcing Queen Esther’s predecessor must be read to every wife in the kingdom as a warning against similar disobedience, and his new queen is chosen from an empire’s worth of beautiful virgins after twelve months of beauty treatments and nightly royal (or attempted royal) intercourse. The king lifts his scepter only in response to Esther, and she . . . well, I’ll spare you the rod.5
The rest of Esther’s fun comes from the narrative’s fast-paced reversals. The Jew Mordecai gets the honors—at the hands of his arch-enemy Haman—that Haman recommends to the king with only himself in mind. The reversals get worse for Haman: he is impaled on the stake that he has built for Mordecai. And what goes for Haman goes for all the Jews’ enemies: the royal decree to kill the empire’s Jews is reversed. The Jews’ enemies are killed instead.
At the end of all this entertainment, Esther institutes its own annual festival, which it calls Purim. During Purim next month, Jews and many Christians will retell the story of Esther. My family was part of a community that celebrated Purim for many years. Our community had a lot of kids, so we toned down the sexual innuendo.
With all of Esther’s comedy bordering on farce, we may be tempted to conclude that the book’s joy comes not in spite of its secularism but because of it. We can make a strong case for this, actually, but only if we use the term “secular” in its original, ancient sense.
The original “secular”: our agency at the overlap of ages
Alter’s and Brueggemann’s conception of the secular—at least in their employment of the term to describe Esther—is too modern. The modern conception of the secular involves a space without religion or God. But Christians coined the term “secular” long ago with a very different concept in mind.
Ancient secularity is an aid for understanding the contingent nature of life during the overlap of two ages, the “present evil age” and the age to come. In this original understanding, according to Luke Bretherton, “the secular is that which is not eternity.” The portion of the age to come that begins at Jesus’s death and ends at his return as king is secular. In this secular age, Bretherton says, Jesus’s disciples acting in faith participate in both “the immanent and the transcendent” and in both “the penultimate and the ultimate.”6
The secular is the break in chronological time that permits our public actions to matter. Without secular time, we’d have only the end time and standard, chronological time that marches inexorably towards the end time. Without secular time, the penultimate would become as fixed as the ultimate.7 None of our public words and deeds would matter. Our hope would be reduced to fate, and fate would reduce us to mere spectators.
In secular time, contingency is destiny
But there’s nothing fixed in biblical hope or in the book of Esther, either. Mordecai and Esther must improvise, and their improv matters. Although Esther was written long before Christians had conceived of secular time, its eponymous heroine receives this famous counsel of contingency from Mordecai:
“For if you keep silent at this time, liberation and rescue will arise for the Jews from another place, and you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?”8
Mordecai’s “who knows” says it all. Contingency is destiny. The proverbial pastors’ kids were right all along: the secular, Bretherton points out, is where the fun starts:
. . . the secular, like pieces of Lego, is supposed to enable free and imaginative play. No one shape is definitive or determinative. Theologically, the secular is a time for the church to improvise forms of witness in response to the prior work of Christ and the Spirit, who are drawing creation into its eschatological fulfillment.9
Esther’s improv, its “free and imaginative play,” cause Brueggemann and Linafelt to call it “the most uncompromisingly Jewish book in the canon . . . the one that most fully discloses the playful openness of Israel’s faith, a faith that refuses any closure wrought by power.”10
Above: “The Easter Bunny and Mordecai enjoy Gender Schmear” by Arkansassy Creative Studio. Used by permission.
Esther, then, was secular before the ancient Christians even coined the term. Queen Esther herself is both sacred and profane (“profane” also in its original, non-pejorative sense, meaning simply “not sacred”). She is the feared queen of an empire that keeps her own people in exile, so she fully participates in Bretherton’s “imminent” and “penultimate.” But Esther also accepts Mordecai’s invitation to use her influence with the king to save the Jews, so she also participates in the “transcendent” and “ultimate.”
Living in empire with a “faithfully secular politics”
In this older, biblical understanding of secularity, we can, like Queen Esther, “perform the gift and vocation of being human” even while living in an empire. This gift of ambiguity discourages extreme, deterministic positions with respect to empire, Bretherton says:
. . . the prevailing social, political, and economic orders must neither be made to bear the full weight of humanity’s meaning and purpose nor nihilistically divested of all meaning and purpose. What is required instead is—paradoxically—a faithfully secular politics.11
The book of Esther meets this paradoxical, “faithfully secular” requirement. Brueggemann uses something like Bretherton’s dichotomy of extremes to describe what the book of Esther avoids:
The tale portrays this tricky Jewish task of identity maintenance that avoids both a sellout of Jewishness for the sake of imperial advancement and sectarian withdrawal into a private Jewish world.12
Esther advocates neither the adoption of a society’s deterministic politics nor a retreat to an entirely private life. Before the church coined “secular” in this dynamic, worlds-straddling sense, the Jews celebrating Esther’s festival of Purim were living it.
Above: “Red Hawk Hunters Mardi Gras Indians” by Derek Bridges. Used by permission.
Carnivals imagine and anticipate a just society
Many synagogues and churches that celebrate Purim celebrate it as a carnival. People dress up as Haman, Esther, Mordecai, and who knows who else. (See, for instance, the above photo of Mordecai with his arm around the Easter Bunny.) Many congregations go further, putting on Purim spiels that act out Esther and its role reversals.13
Carnivals are essentially subversive. That’s because carnivals share secularity’s contingency and destiny—the “who knows” and the “such a time as this.” People imagine a different future and act it out together in the present. In a carnival, “the young can scold the old, women can ridicule men . . . muted personal vendettas and factional strife can be expressed,” James C. Scott says. However, “much of the social aggression within carnival is directed at dominant power figures.”14 These subversive reversals in carnivals highlight “the ambivalent nature of life itself,” Timothy K. Beal writes; “destruction and uncrowning are related to birth and renewal; death is linked to regeneration.”15 Most of what Scott and Beal describe happens in Esther, which Brueggemann and Linafelt call “a huge act of subversive, dissenting imagination.”16 Carnivals like Purim assert ambiguity and contingency in the face of an empire’s claims to clarity and permanence.
Carnivals create public space by challenging any hegemonic grip on that space. A carnival’s challenge involves “role inversion and transformation, and much chaos,” Rebecca Solnit says, “as well as the basic ingredient of people living together in a shared space and going beyond their usual bounds.” Solnit quotes the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who finds a new humanity in a carnival’s madness: “People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations. These truly human relations were not only a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced.”17 In a carnival, in other words, the new creation is not only expressed but also experienced in public.
Carnivals also can carry “a sense of being outside ordinary time,” Solnit says.18 Carnivals, including those performed during Purim, are “secular” in this fine, old sense of the word: they transfigure ordinary time by intersecting it with time’s end. Carnivals are witnesses of justice and new creation come to earth.
“Cosmo” by Brock Hewitt: Stories in Sound used by permission. The footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.
Alter, Hebrew Bible, Vol. 3, 713.
Brueggemann and Linafelt, Introduction to the Old Testament, 366-67.
Alter, 713.
Alter, 714.
Esther 5:2. But Robert Alter won’t spare you: “Esther approached and touched the top of the scepter. The literal sense is ‘head of the scepter.’ A sexual undermeaning here is not to be excluded.” Alter, 729n2.
Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 231. Bretherton distinguishes this secularity from the modern notion of secularism. With secularism, “the secular comes to mean reality stripped of religion.” Bretherton, 232.
Secular time is similar to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “messianic time.”
Esther 4:14 NNAS.
Bretherton, 231.
Brueggemann and Linafelt, 369.
Bretherton, 237.
Brueggemann and Linafelt, 365.
Kohn, Daniel. “Purim Plays and Carnivals.” My Jewish Learning (blog), 2025. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/holidays/Jewish_Holidays/Purim/In_the_Community/Plays_and_Carnivals.shtml.
Scott, Domination and the Arts, 173-74.
Quoted in Brueggemann and Linafelt, 367.
Brueggemann and Linafelt, 368.
Solnit, Paradise Built in Hell, 167.
Solnit, 166.