When God Goes Quiet

The Night the King Could Not Sleep

Somewhere in the palace at Susa, a man is lying awake. He is the most powerful person on the face of the earth, and he cannot sleep. Nobody knows why. The book doesn’t say he was ill, or troubled, or full of wine. It says only this.

“On that night the king could not sleep.”

— Esther 6:1 (ESV)

Anyone who has lain awake while the generator coughed outside, or while the phone screen lit the ceiling at three in the morning, knows how little that sentence seems to carry. A king can’t sleep. It happens. And yet the whole fate of a people turns on it.

To pass the time, the king asks for a book of records to be read to him. His attendants bring the royal chronicles and begin reading, and by what looks like pure chance they land on an entry about a plot to kill him that was foiled years earlier by a Jewish clerk called Mordecai. The king asks what reward the man received. The young men who attend him answer that nothing has been done for him (Esther 6:1 to 3).

That small exchange, at an hour when no one important is awake to notice, starts to unpick a plan to wipe out every Jew in the Persian Empire.

I want to take you through how the story gets to that night, because the strangest thing about Esther sits in plain sight. The book contains no miracle. Nobody prays, at least not in so many words. And nowhere in the Hebrew text does anyone say that God did any of it.

A Book That Never Names God

The Hebrew text of Esther never names God, and that is a plain fact about the book. None of the seven Old Testament names for God occurs in it, and along with the Song of Songs it is one of only two books of the Hebrew Bible that never mention him directly (Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary, n.d.; Book of Esther, n.d.). The Greek versions of Esther are another matter. They carry additions that supply prayers by Mordecai and Esther and speak openly of God’s intervention (Book of Esther, n.d.). Whoever wrote the Hebrew version left all that out, or never had it.

Why? Honest scholars say they aren’t sure. Benjamin Shaw, who teaches Old Testament at Reformation Bible College, put it this way when asked about the silence: “in a certain sense, none of us really knows why it doesn’t” (Shaw, n.d.). He points out that other Old Testament stories, Genesis 37 among them, also get along without naming God, and that he reads Esther as a book where “God is at work behind the scenes.”

There are other readings. Some readers have found the divine name hidden in four acrostics, formed from the first or last letters of consecutive Hebrew words, and three ancient manuscripts marked those letters in red (Book of Esther, n.d.). The Talmud plays on the Hebrew of Deuteronomy 31:18, where God says he will surely hide his face, and finds Esther’s name inside the Hebrew word for hide (Book of Esther, n.d.). Whether the author meant any of that, nobody can prove. I think the acrostics are a lovely thing to know and a thin thing to build a sermon on.

What I can say with confidence is that the silence is a feature of the book and not an accident of editing. Fasting appears in it and prayer does not (Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary, n.d.). Coincidence after coincidence is left sitting on the page without a label. It is as if the author wanted you, the reader, to stand in the same position as the Jews of Susa, who had no prophet and no pillar of fire and had to read their own lives with nothing but the facts in front of them.

That is a position many Nigerian believers know. If you grew up in a church where the vigil ran until four in the morning, where a prophet’s word could make the back of your neck prickle, you were taught that God shows up loudly, and sometimes he does. But anyone who has waited for a visa decision, a job, a test result or a husband has also met the other season, where the prayers go up and the sky gives back nothing you could point at. Esther was written for that season.

The Queen Who Refused and the Girl Who Was Chosen

The story opens in Susa, one of the Persian capitals, with a king called Ahasuerus. Modern historians usually identify him with Xerxes I, whose Persian name lies behind the Hebrew form, and who ruled the Persian Empire from 486 to 465 BC (Xerxes I, n.d.; Book of Esther, n.d.). He is the Xerxes who lost the sea battle of Salamis to the Greeks in September 480 BC. In the third year of his reign he throws a banquet for his nobles and officers that goes on for a hundred and eighty days, followed by a week of feasting for everyone in the citadel (Esther 1:3 to 5). It reads like a man showing off. A person who is quietly sure of his power doesn’t need half a year to prove it.

At the end of the week he sends for his queen, Vashti, to be brought in wearing her crown so that the guests may look at her beauty. She refuses. The text doesn’t tell us why, and I would be making it up if I said I knew. What it does tell us is that the king burns with anger, his advisers panic that every wife in the empire will copy her, and Vashti is removed from her position by a law that cannot be changed (Esther 1:10 to 22).

Vashti isn’t the hero of the book. The narrator moves on from her fast, and the thing I notice is how petty the machinery is. A king’s wounded pride, a panel of advisers who are frankly frightened of their own wives, a law that can’t be taken back. Nobody in that room is serving a divine plan, and nobody thinks they are. Yet the vacancy they create is the one the story needs. But her refusal opens a vacancy, and a search begins for a new queen. Young women are collected from across the empire and put through twelve months of preparation before each is taken in to the king (Esther 2:12 to 14). Among them is a Jewish orphan named Hadassah, raised by her older cousin Mordecai, and known in the palace by her second name, Esther. Mordecai tells her to say nothing about her people (Esther 2:10). It looks like prudence, and it is also a card put face down on the table. The king prefers her to all the rest and sets the royal crown on her head (Esther 2:7, 10, 17).

The dates matter here, because they show how slowly the story moves. The text puts Esther’s presentation to the king in his seventh year (Esther 2:16). On the dates above, that is within a couple of years of Salamis, which is to say a king who has just been humbled by the Greeks has come home and is looking for a new queen. A modern reader might guess that God had been preparing a Jewish queen for years. The text says something smaller and more believable. A king lost a war, a queen lost her place, and a girl with no power happened to be in the right city.

Then comes a detail that is easy to read past. Mordecai, sitting near the king’s gate, overhears two of the king’s doorkeepers plotting to kill him. He passes the news to Esther, she passes it on to the king in Mordecai’s name, the plot is checked out, the men are put to death, and the incident is written into the chronicles (Esther 2:21 to 23).

And then the book moves on, and the matter is forgotten. Nothing comes to Mordecai. The record goes into a store and stays there for years.

A Man Who Could Not Bear One Refusal

Chapter 3 introduces Haman, whom the king promotes above all his officials, and the temperature in the book drops. All the king’s servants at the gate are ordered to bow to him. Mordecai doesn’t.

The text is brief about why. It says only that when the others asked him day after day, he told them he was a Jew (Esther 3:4). Readers have guessed at his reasons for centuries, and it’s possible that Mordecai himself could not have given a tidy answer. There is a history behind the encounter, though. Haman is called an Agagite, and Agag was the Amalekite king whom Saul failed to destroy when God told him to (1 Samuel 15:8 to 9). Mordecai’s family line runs back through a man called Kish (Esther 2:5), the same name Saul’s father bore, and the text seems to want us to hear the echo. An old quarrel between two families may be walking around Susa in court clothes.

What Haman does next is the part that ought to alarm us. A normal offended official would want Mordecai disciplined or removed. Scapegoating works exactly like this. It takes one grievance and finds a whole category of people to carry it, and it has never needed much more than a persuasive tone and someone willing to sign. Haman looks at one man who won’t bow and decides that Mordecai’s whole people must go (Esther 3:5 to 6). Don’t tell me that evil is only structural, a matter of poor institutions and inherited habits that better schooling will iron out. Esther 3 shows what can live in the heart of a man who has the ring, the rank and the bowing crowd, and still can’t enjoy any of it because one person at the gate stays upright.

He then goes to the king and describes this people in careful, bloodless language. They are scattered, their laws differ from everyone else’s, and it does not profit the king to tolerate them (Esther 3:8). He offers silver. The king doesn’t ask who they are or what they have done. He hands over his ring. Lots are cast, which is where the festival of Purim gets its name, to pick a day, and the day chosen is the thirteenth of the twelfth month, Adar (Esther 3:7, 13). On the dates the book supplies, the decree is issued in the twelfth year of the king’s reign, about 474 BC, and the killing is set for March 473 BC (Book of Esther, n.d.).

The couriers ride out. The king and Haman sit down to drink, and the text tells us the city of Susa was perplexed (Esther 3:15).

What Mordecai Said to a Frightened Queen

When the news reaches Mordecai he tears his clothes, puts on sackcloth and ashes, and goes out through the city crying aloud. Esther, inside the palace, hears of it, and the two of them begin to exchange messages through a servant. He sends her a copy of the decree and asks her to go to the king and plead for her people (Esther 4:8).

She hesitates, and I don’t think we should judge her for it. She reminds Mordecai of the rule every servant of the king knows. Anyone who goes into the inner court without being summoned is put to death, unless the king holds out his golden sceptre, and she has not been called to him for thirty days (Esther 4:11). It was a rule with real teeth. Herodotus, who wrote within living memory of Xerxes’ reign, tells a story about the six men who joined Darius in his coup. They were given the right to enter the king’s palace unannounced, except when he was with a woman (Herodotus, 1920 to 1925, 3.84). That privilege would have meant nothing if everybody else could walk in. Esther isn’t dramatising. She is counting the cost out loud.

Mordecai’s reply is the hinge of the whole book, and it is a strange mixture of comfort and threat.

“Do not think to yourself that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

— Esther 4:13 to 14 (ESV)

Look at what he assumes. He assumes that the people will be saved, and that the saving doesn’t depend on Esther. Relief will come from another place. He doesn’t say where. This is the closest the book comes to talking about God, and he still doesn’t use the name. What he refuses to assume is that she will be part of it. She might sit it out, in which case she and her family will be lost along with everything else she thought she had secured.

And then his last sentence is a question. Who knows? He isn’t announcing that she was put there for this purpose. He is asking her to consider whether that might be so. That seems to me an honest way for a believer to speak about providence. He claims no view from heaven. The facts of your life have an arrangement to them, he says, you can’t prove who arranged it, and you are now being asked to act as though somebody did.

Esther sends her answer back.

“Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.”

— Esther 4:16 (ESV)

This is where the book turns, and it is easy to miss what changes. Before this verse the story has been something that happens to people. After it, the people begin to decide. Esther has stopped managing the outcome and started offering herself to it. Three days of fasting follow, and then she puts on her royal robes and walks into the inner court, and the king holds out the sceptre (Esther 5:1 to 2).

Two Banquets and a Gallows Going Up

What she does next puzzles people. The king asks what she wants, offering her up to half the kingdom, and she answers by inviting him and Haman to dinner. At the dinner he asks again and she invites them back the next evening (Esther 5:3 to 8). The text gives no reason. Maybe she was frightened. Maybe she was testing the mood. Maybe she had learned the one thing the impatient among us find hardest to learn, which is that an open door isn’t the same as a signal to speak.

Meanwhile Haman walks home from the first dinner feeling like the most important man in Persia, until he passes Mordecai at the gate, still not bowing. He gathers his wife and friends, lists his wealth and his honours, and confesses that none of it counts for anything while that one Jew sits at the gate (Esther 5:9 to 13). They tell him what to do, and the book records the advice in a single line.

“Let a gallows fifty cubits high be made.”

— Esther 5:14 (ESV)

A cubit was about forty five centimetres, so Haman’s gallows stood nearly twenty three metres tall, about the height of a seven storey building. The Hebrew word is the ordinary word for wood, and some readers take it to mean impalement on a stake. That would fit the empire’s habits. Herodotus says that Darius, once he had retaken Babylon, impaled about three thousand of its leading men (Herodotus, 1920 to 1925, 3.159). Haman is ordering something the empire already did.

The night that follows is the one we began with. On one side of Susa a queen has fasted and has two dinners to get through. On the other side a man is admiring the gallows he has just had built. And between them, in the palace, a king who answers to neither of them can’t sleep.

The chronicles are read, the old entry about Mordecai turns up, and the attendants admit that nothing has been done for him. Then Haman walks in, early, to ask permission to hang Mordecai. The king speaks first. What should be done for a man the king wants to honour? Haman, certain the king means him, describes robes from the king’s wardrobe, the king’s horse and a herald crying out through the square. The king says to do all of that for Mordecai the Jew, and to leave out nothing (Esther 6:4 to 10).

The text doesn’t describe Haman’s face. It doesn’t need to.

At the second dinner Esther finally speaks. She is a Jew, her people have been sold, and the man behind it is sitting at the table. The secret Mordecai told her to keep is now the only card she holds, and she plays it at the one moment it can still count. The king storms out into the garden. When he comes back, Haman has thrown himself on the couch where Esther is lying to beg for his life, and the king takes it for an assault. One of the attendants mentions that a gallows fifty cubits high is standing in Haman’s courtyard, and Haman is hanged on it (Esther 7:3 to 10).

Evil, it turns out, is always building something, and it is usually building it for someone else.

What the Coincidences Do Not Prove

The strongest objection to everything I’ve said is a simple one, and a sceptic would put it fairly like this. Stories collect coincidences. A king who can’t sleep, a clerk whose good deed was filed and forgotten, a convenient reading of the wrong page of the chronicle, a villain who builds his own gallows. In a long enough history, a few things line up. And in a book that never says God did any of it, why would you be the one to say so? You’d be reading your own faith into the gaps.

I’d concede the logic. The author of Esther never gives you a proof, and I suspect that is deliberate. If the book had written “and God made the king sleepless,” it would have given a sceptic nothing to argue about and the believer nothing to do. As it stands, the evidence is exactly as ambiguous as most of our lives are. You can read the night of Esther 6 as luck or as hand. The book simply won’t take that decision away from you.

But I would say two things in reply. The first is that the coincidences are not scattered. They have a direction. A queen is removed, a girl is promoted, a plot is foiled and forgotten, a refusal to bow is magnified into a decree, and the whole thing converges on one night, one entry and one reversal. A single lucky break is luck. A chain in which every link seems to bear the weight of the next one is harder to wave away. Several Old Testament narratives work this way, which is why Shaw can say that God works behind the scenes without having to read a name into the text (Shaw, n.d.).

The second is that Esther does not describe a world where hidden providence keeps everybody safe. The decree could not be cancelled, because Persian law didn’t allow it, so a second decree was issued allowing the Jews to defend themselves (Esther 8:11). Fighting followed, and the book counts the dead on the other side, five hundred in Susa and seventy five thousand in the provinces (Esther 9:6, 16). That is a hard passage and I’m not going to tidy it. The deliverance in Esther is real and it is not clean. It comes with a battle, it takes fear, and it doesn’t undo the grief of anyone who was already in the way.

There is a further thing to say honestly. Mordecai’s good deed was not rewarded for years. The king whose sleeplessness saved a people was himself murdered in August 465 BC by Artabanus, the captain of his own bodyguard (Xerxes I, n.d.). Nothing in Esther claims that a well placed providence makes a palace safe. Providence in this book is no guarantee that the right people stay alive. It is the claim that no decree, however irrevocable, and no villain, however well supplied, is the last word on what happens to the people of God.

I find that more believable than the version that promises you a clean testimony by Friday. Plenty of testimonies are true and clean, and I’d never want to play them down. But many of us are living in the long stretch between the decree and the reversal, and for that stretch the church needs a book that tells the truth about waiting.

Picture a young woman in Enugu, a scene I am inventing, though you may recognise her. She finished her degree two years ago. She has sent out applications, queued for interviews, and prayed through the nights with her mother. Her friends post their good news on WhatsApp status and she types a congratulation each time. Nothing has moved. If someone tells her that God is working all things together, she is entitled to ask for the evidence. Esther’s answer is neither a slogan nor a scolding. It hands her a story in which the evidence is only visible from the far side, and then asks what a person does on the near side.

Trusting a God Who Does Not Speak

Paul says in Romans 8:28 that “we know that for those who love God all things work together for good.” The line gets printed on mugs, and the weight of it is easy to lose that way. In Esther you can see what it looks like when it’s true. Every single thing in the book works toward the deliverance, the bad things included. A king’s temper, a drunken command, a villain’s grudge, an insomniac night. And nobody in the book is given a way of seeing it while it happens. The people in Susa fasted and waited without knowing how it would end.

That seems to be the lesson the author was after. Esther didn’t wait for a sign before she walked in. She asked others to fast, she set her own life against the law, and she told them plainly that she might die. Her courage reads like the decision of a woman who has weighed the odds and chosen to act as though Mordecai’s question had an answer. I think this is the sort of trust that God honours most, because it needs no proof to start.

The Jews who still keep the festival of Purim have never forgotten that. This year it was kept from the evening of 2 March to 3 March, and it is still marked with the reading of the whole book of Esther, gifts of food to friends, charity to the poor and a festive meal (Hebcal, n.d.). The festival remembers a rescue that arrived without a heavenly voice, which is perhaps why the scroll is read aloud to the end every year.

If you are in that kind of night, I can’t promise you a king who will lose sleep on your behalf. I don’t know how your story ends, and anyone who says they do should be asked for their source. But I can tell you what the book does with silence. It treats it as a room where the next faithful act still has to be done, and where someone you cannot see may be arranging more than you can count.

So here is a modest thing to try. Read Esther in a single sitting this week, all ten chapters, which will take you less time than most of the videos in your phone. Don’t hunt for a lesson. Just watch for the places where the author could have written God’s name and left a blank. Then think of the thing in your own life that you have been waiting to see explained, and ask whether there is something in front of you that you can do while the explanation hasn’t come. Esther did not know that the king would be awake. She went in anyway.

References

Biblical References

Esther 6:1 (ESV). The epigraph and the opening scene: the king’s sleepless night, the first link in the reversal.
Esther 6:1 to 3 (ESV). The reading of the chronicles and the discovery that nothing had been done for Mordecai (6:1 quoted, 6:2 to 3 paraphrased).
Esther 4:13 to 14 (ESV). Mordecai’s message to Esther, quoted in full as the hinge of the argument.
Esther 4:16 (ESV). Esther’s reply, “if I perish, I perish,” quoted in full as the turn from events to decision.
Esther 5:14 (ESV). “Let a gallows fifty cubits high be made,” quoted in part; the height is converted at about forty five centimetres to the cubit as the ESV footnote gives.
Esther 1:3 to 5 and 1:10 to 22. The feast, Vashti’s refusal and her removal (paraphrased, not quoted).
Esther 2:5, 7, 10, 12 to 14, 16 to 17, 21 to 23. Mordecai’s line, Esther’s background, the search for a queen, the date of her presentation and the foiled plot (paraphrased, not quoted).
Esther 3:4 to 8, 13 and 15. Mordecai’s refusal, Haman’s reaction, the lots, the decree and the city’s confusion (paraphrased, not quoted).
Esther 4:8 and 4:11. The copy of the decree and the rule about the inner court (paraphrased, not quoted).
Esther 5:1 to 13. The sceptre raised, the two banquets and Haman’s boasting (paraphrased, not quoted).
Esther 6:4 to 10 and 7:3 to 10. The honour given to Mordecai and Haman’s hanging (paraphrased, not quoted).
Esther 8:8, 8:11 and 9:6, 16. The second decree and the numbers killed (paraphrased, not quoted).
1 Samuel 15:8 to 9. Agag and Saul, the background to Haman as an Agagite (paraphrased, not quoted).
Romans 8:28 (ESV). The first clause is quoted (“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good”); the rest of the verse is not quoted.
Genesis 37. A narrative that does not name God, cited through Shaw (not quoted).
Deuteronomy 31:18. The verse about God hiding his face, cited through the Talmudic play on Esther’s name (not quoted).

Other Sources

Book of Esther. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Esther
Hebcal. (n.d.). Purim 2026. https://hebcal.com/h/purim-2026?i=on
Herodotus. (1920 to 1925). The Histories (A. D. Godley, Trans.). Harvard University Press. Book 3, sections 84 and 159, read at https://cts.perseids.org/read/greekLit/tlg0016/tlg001/perseus-eng2/3.84.1-3.84.3 and https://cts.perseids.org/read/greekLit/tlg0016/tlg001/perseus-eng2/3.159.1-3.159.2
Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary. (n.d.). Where is God in the book of Esther? https://www.hkbts.edu.hk/en/?p=68424
Shaw, B. (n.d.). Why isn’t God mentioned in the book of Esther? [Audio podcast episode]. In N. W. Bingham (Host), Ask Ligonier. Ligonier Ministries. https://learn.ligonier.org/podcasts/ask-ligonier/why-isnt-god-mentioned-in-the-book-of-esther
Xerxes I. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_I

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.