Strange Story: Esther 1 Beauty Contests Were Not the Way They Chose Queens
In the book of Esther, why was a new queen not sought from one of the king’s other wives, or from the daughters of nobility?
It can be assumed that any king of ancient times, even kings of small city-states, would have had more than one wife. King Xerxes was no ordinary king. So it is safe to assume he had many wives. Why was one of these wives not elevated to the position of queen? All the most important nobles were already within the king’s inner circle, and many of his wives were likely daughters of these noblemen. But if a new queen needed to be sought from outside his own harem, why not seek one from among members of the nobility in his kingdom? That would have been the acceptable way to do things in ancient times.
This beauty contest idea was very strange, and not typical of ancient practices. Back then it was all about who you know and who you are connected with. You didn’t just bring in a total stranger and make her the queen simply because she had physical beauty. Many women could be found who had a lovely appearance, but not all of them would make a good queen.
Three reasons come to mind (although the last two are related):
1. Their culture had become obsessed with physical beauty.
2. The king could not trust the daughters of nobility because of the growing popularity of feminism.
3. This was a test of character, not just a beauty contest.
Allow me to go over these three points in more detail.
Their culture had become obsessed with physical beauty.
There are a few indications that this may have been the case. Vashti is described as very beautiful and the king wanted to bring her from her own banquet to his banquet to show off her beauty. Then the fact that the king’s attendants suggested a beauty contest implies that the culture as a whole was fixated on physical beauty to the extent that people thought a queen was nothing more than a trophy. However, in reality the queen, even in ancient times, had influence; she was a role model for the women and she often helped raise the next king. However, if this interpretation is true, they seemed to be willing sacrifice everything else on the altar of physical beauty.
The girls taken to the king were probably about 13 or 14 years old. While girls that young were able to bear children, they were not as voluptuous as women in their twenties and thirties. But the men of those ancient cultures were accustomed to receiving wives that were very young, and they could look at the beauty she displayed at age 14 and see what her beauty would probably be like in her twenties and thirties. As we read the book of Esther we need to picture these girls being very young and their bodies being close to the same when it comes to level of development.
Many cultures of modern time are likewise fixated on physical beauty. This has probably always been the case, but the advent of photography, television, movies, internet pornography, social media and the internet in general, and cell phones with the capability to take good pictures and videos have contributed to making our culture seemingly more obsessed with physical beauty than those before us. If nothing else, we have much more access to images of beautiful women than any culture before us.
The king could not trust the daughters of nobility because of the growing popularity of feminism.
If this was true, then almost all the females, especially among the nobility, were already heading the direction that Vashti was headed; she simply gave it a voice more clearly than the others had. Therefore the king did not know if he could trust any of the daughters of nobility. The king’s attending servants knew what was going on among the women and therefore made the suggestion that is recorded in Esther 2:2-4,
If the situation was bad enough that a major change was made in how decisions of this nature were processed, we should know that what we call feminism was becoming widespread. We can also assume that it was growing most quickly among the upper class.
In Esther 1:16-20 we have the speech given by Memucan about this “feminism” problem. The fact that the other nobles and officials agreed with him tells me that they saw what was happening in their culture and even in their own homes, but they felt helpless to stem the tide.
The fact that Vashti chose to refuse the order of the king was shocking for her time. I imagine that at her own banquet she had been raving against the abuses of men, so when the call came for her to present herself to the drunken horde of men, she felt she had to refuse or be a hypocrite.
Maybe none of his other wives had the right attitude, but rather all of them were in agreement with Vashti. If this were the situation in Persia at that time, it would explain why the winner of this contest would become the queen rather than any of the wives he already had.
This means that most, if not all of the beautiful virgins that were made part of the “contest” were from the middle and lower classes, not the upper class. That was revolutionary for its time.
But we must remember that all the girls that had gone to be with the king became his concubines, and if I understand correctly, in that entire region of the world in those days, the sons of the concubines did not get any inheritance. The noblemen probably saw the beauty contest as a big risk. They did not want their daughter to end up as a simple concubine of the king with no prestige and no inheritance for her sons. They preferred to arrange a marriage for their daughter with someone who would be sure to give her a relatively prestigious future – the son of another nobleman. Therefore, I envision the noblemen quickly arranging to give their daughters in marriage before they could be taken to the citadel to become part of this contest and probably a lowly concubine. Meanwhile, for the poor or middle class, it was like playing the lottery – the chances of winning were slim, but the pay out was big if she became queen.
This was not a beauty contest, it was a test of character.
(I will explain this in a separate lesson.)