Esther 8:15

And Mordecai went out from the presence of the king in royal apparel of blue and white, and with a great crown of gold, and with a garment of fine linen and purple: and the city of Shushan rejoiced and was glad.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

(15) Blue and white.—See Note on Esther 1:6.

Crown.—This is a different word from that previously used of a “royal crown” (Esther 6:8).

Garment.—The inner robe or tunic. That of the king was of purple striped with white.

Linen.—White linen.

The city of Shushan rejoiced.—The tide of royal favour had changed, and the people of Shushan were evidently not very different from the mass of the populace of the present day, who shout with the winning side. Nothing succeeds like success, and the mobile vulgus of Susa cheered Mordecai as doubtless they would have hooted had they seen him led to execution. The crowds who welcomed our Lord into Jerusalem on His triumphal entry soon let their enthusiasm die away—“ Hosanna!” now; tomorrow, “Crucify!”

MacLaren's Expositions

Esther

THE NET BROKEN

Esther 8:3 - Esther 8:8,Esther 8:15 - Esther 8:17.

The spirit of this passage may perhaps be best caught by taking the three persons appearing in it, and the One who does not appear, but acts unseen through them all.

I. The heroine of the whole book and of this chapter is Esther, one of the sweetest and noblest of the women of Scripture. The orphan girl who had grown up into beauty under the care of her uncle Mordecai, and was lifted suddenly from sheltered obscurity into the ‘fierce light that beats upon a throne,’ like some flower culled in a shady nook and set in a king’s bosom, was true to her childhood’s protector and to her people, and kept her sweet, brave gentleness unspoiled by the rapid elevation which ruins so many characters. Her Jewish name of Hadassah {‘myrtle’} well befits her, for she is clothed with unostentatious beauty, pure and fragrant as the blossoms that brides twine in their hair. But, withal, she has a true woman’s courage which is always ready to endure any evil and dare any danger at the bidding of her heart. She took her life in her hand when she sought an audience of Ahasuerus uninvited, and she knew that she did. Nothing in literature is nobler than her quiet words, which measure her danger without shrinking, and front it without heroics: ‘If I perish, I perish!’

The danger was not past, though she was queen and beloved; for a despot’s love is a shifting sand-bank, which may yield anchorage to-day, and to-morrow may be washed away. So she counted not her life dear unto herself when, for the second time, as in our passage, she ventured, uninvited, into the king’s presence. The womanly courage that risks life for love’s sake is nobler than the soldier’s that feels the lust of battle maddening him.

Esther’s words to the king are full of tact. She begins with what seems to have been the form of address prescribed by custom, for it is used by her in her former requests {Esther 5:8; Esther 7:3}. But she adds a variation of the formula, tinged with more personal reference to the king’s feeling towards her, as well as breathing entire submission to his estimate of what was fitting. ‘If the thing seem right before the king,’ appeals to the sense of justice that lay dormant beneath the monarch’s arbitrary will; ‘and I be pleasing in his eyes,’ drew him by the charm of her beauty. She avoided making the king responsible for the plot, and laid it at the door of the dead and discredited Haman. It was his device, and since he had fallen, his policy could be reversed without hurting the king’s dignity. And then with fine tact, as well as with a burst of genuine feeling, she flings all her personal influence into the scale, and seeks to move the king, not by appeals to his justice or royal duty, but to his love for her, which surely could not bear to see her suffer. One may say that it was a low motive to appeal to, to ask the despot to save a people in order to keep one woman from sorrow; and so it was. It was Ahasuerus’s fault that such a reason had more weight with him than nobler ones. It was not Esther’s that she used her power over him to carry her point. She used the weapons that she had, and that she knew would be efficacious. The purpose for which she used them is her justification.

Esther may well teach her sisters to-day to be brave and gentle, to use their influence over men for high purposes of public good, to be the inspirers of their husbands, lovers, brothers, for all noble thinking and doing; to make the cause of the oppressed their own, to be the apostles of mercy and the hinderers of wrong, to keep true to their early associations if prosperity comes to them, and to cherish sympathy with their nation so deep that they cannot ‘endure to see the evil that shall come unto them’ without using all their womanly influence to avert it.

II. Ahasuerus plays a sorry part beside Esther. He knows no law but his own will, and that is moved, not by conscience or reason, but by ignoble passions and sensual desires. He tosses his subjects’ lives as trivial gifts to any who ask for them. Haman’s wife knew that he had only to ‘speak to the king,’ and Mordecai would be hanged; Haman had no difficulty in securing the royal mandate for the murder of all the Jews. Sated with the indulgence of low desires, he let all power slip from his idle hands, and his manhood was rotted away by wallowing in the pigsty of voluptuousness. But he was tenacious of the semblance of authority, and demanded the appearance of abject submission from the ‘servants’ who were his masters. He yielded to Esther’s prayer as lightly as to Haman’s plot. Whether the Jews were wiped out or not mattered nothing to him, so long as he had no trouble in the affair.

To shift all responsibility off his own shoulders on to somebody else’s was his one aim. He was as untrue to his duty when he gave his signet to Mordecai, and bade him and Esther do as they liked, as when he had given it to Haman. And with all this slothful indifference to his duty, he was sensitive to etiquette, and its cobwebs held him whom the cords of his royal obligations could not hold. It mattered not to him that the edict which he allowed Mordecai to promulgate practically lit the flames of civil war. He had washed his hands of the whole business.

It is a hideous picture of an Eastern despot, and has been said to be unhistorical and unbelievable. But the world has seen many examples of rulers whom the possession of unlimited and irresponsible power has corrupted in like fashion. And others than rulers may take the warning that to live to self is the mother of all sins and crimes; that no man can safely make his own will and his own passions his guides; that there is no slavery so abject as that of the man who is tyrannised by his lower nature; that there is a temptation besetting us all to take the advantages and neglect the duties of our position, and that to yield to it is sure to end in moral ruin. We are all kings, even if our kingdom be only our own selves, and we shall rule wisely only if we rule as God’s viceroys, and think more of duty than of delight.

III. Mordecai is a kind of duplicate of Joseph, and embodies valuable lessons. Contented acceptance of obscurity and neglect of his services, faithfulness to his people and his God in the foul atmosphere of such a court, wise reticence, patient discharge of small duties, undoubting hope when things looked blackest fed by stedfast faith in God, unchangedness of character and purpose when lifted to supreme dignity, the use of influence and place, not for himself, but for his people,-all these are traits which may be imitated in any life. We should be the same men, whether we sit unnoticed among the lackeys at the gate, or are bearing the brunt of the hatred of powerful foes, or are clothed ‘in royal apparel of blue and white, and with a great crown of gold.’ These gauds were nothing to Mordecai, and earthly honours should never turn our heads. He valued power because it enabled him to save his brethren, and we should cultivate the same spirit. The political world, with its fierce struggles for personal ends, its often disregard of the public good, and its use of place and power for ‘making a pile’ or helping relations up, would be much the better for some infusion of the spirit of Mordecai.

IV. But we must not look only at the visible persons and forces. This book of Esther does not say much about God, but His presence broods over it all, and is the real spring that moves the movers that are seen. It is all a lesson of how God works out His purposes through men that seem to themselves to be working out theirs. The king’s criminal abandonment to lust and luxury, Haman’s meanly personal pique, Esther’s beauty, the fall of the favourite, the long past services of Mordecai, even the king’s sleepless night, are all threads in the web, and God is the weaver. The story raises the whole question of the standing miracle of the co-existence and co-operation of the divine and the human. Man is free and responsible, God is sovereign and all-pervading. He ‘makes the wrath of man to praise Him, and with the remainder thereof He girdeth Himself.’ To-day, as then, He is working out His deep designs through men whom He has raised up, though they have not known Him. Amid the clash of contending interests and worldly passions His solemn purpose steadily advances to its end, like the irresistible ocean current, which persists through all storms that agitate the surface, and draws them into the drift of its silent trend. Ahasuerus, Haman, Esther, Mordecai, are His instruments, and yet each of them is the doer of his or her deed, and has to answer to Him for it.

Benson Commentary

Esther 8:15. With a great crown of gold — Which the chief of the Persian princes were permitted to wear, but with sufficient distinction from the king’s crown. For it must be observed, that the word royal is not added here, as in chap. Esther 6:8, nor is the horse mentioned, as there, because no extraordinary honours are here spoken of, but only that honour, and that habit, which immediately belonged to the keeper of the royal signet. — Houb. The city of Shushan rejoiced — Not only Jews, but the greatest number of the citizens, who by the law of nature abhorred bloody counsels, and had a complacency in acts of mercy.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

8:15-17 Mordecai's robes now were rich. These things are not worth notice, but as marks of the king's favour, and the fruit of God's favour to his church. It is well with a land, when ensigns of dignity are made the ornaments of serious piety. When the church prospers, many will join it, who will be shy of it when in trouble. When believers have rest, and walk in the fear of the Lord, and the comfort of the Holy Ghost, they will be multiplied. And the attempts of Satan to destroy the church, always tend to increase the number of true Christians.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

See the Esther 1:6 note. The "crown" was not a crown like the king's, but a mere golden band or coronet.

A garment - Or, "an inner robe." The tunic or inner robe of the king was of purple, striped with white.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

Es 8:15-17. Mordecai's Honors, and the Jews' Joy.

15. Mordecai went out … in royal apparel—He was invested with the khelaat of official honor. A dress of blue and white was held in great estimation among the Persians; so that Mordecai, whom the king delighted to honor, was in fact arrayed in the royal dress and insignia. The variety and the kind of insignia worn by a favorite at once makes known to the people the particular dignity to which he has been raised.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

With a great crown of gold; which the chief of the Persian princes were permitted to wear, but with sufficient distinction from the king’s crown.

The city of Shushan; not only Jews, but the greatest number of the citizens, who, by the law of nature written upon their hearts, had an abhorrency from bloody counsels and designs, and a complacency in acts of benignity and mercy; or for other reasons, of which See Poole "Esther 3:15".

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

And Mordecai went out from the presence of the king,.... And walked or rode about in the city to show himself to his friends:

in royal apparel of blue and white; such as the Persian kings wore, and were not allowed to any other, as Xenophon writes (g):

and with a great crown of gold; a coronet, such as princes and nobles wear; the latter Targum calls it a great golden chain, and such the eastern kings used to give to their favourites; see Daniel 5:29,

and with a garment of fine linen and purple; this must be an inner garment, since it is distinct from the royal robe before mentioned; though as the word signifies a wrap, or roll, it may design a turban, which was a roll of linen wrapped about the head; and such was the Persian diadem, according to Curtius (h), which was of a purple colour, mixed with white; and so the Septuagint version is, "and a diadem of fine linen, of a purple colour"; and if so, the crown of gold was not worn on his head, nor is it likely it should be allowed, but was carried before him; see Gill on Esther 6:8,

and the city of Shushan rejoiced, and was glad; not only the Jews in it, but the native inhabitants of it, that had any sense of humanity, expressed their joy at the sight of Mordecai thus arrayed; that so good a man was advanced at court, and so bad a man as Haman was displaced and put to death; see Proverbs 29:2.

(g) Cyropaedia, l. 8. c. 23. (h) Hist. l. 3. c. 3. & l. 6. c. 6. Vid. Solerium de Pileo, sect. 9.

Geneva Study Bible

And Mordecai went out from the presence of the king in royal apparel of blue and white, and with a great crown of gold, and with a garment of fine linen and purple: and the city of Shushan rejoiced and was glad.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

15. in royal apparel of blue and white] by way of indicating externally the revulsion of feeling. The Persian king’s own robe was purple, or purple embroidered with gold over another garment of purple striped or mixed with white. See Rawlinson’s Anc. Mon. (2nd ed.), iii. 203.

crown] not kether, that of the monarch, but ‘aṭârâh, which may have been a less rich one.

a robe of fine linen and purple] The LXX. erroneously translate ‘a diadem’ etc. The king wore a diadem consisting of a blue and white band or fillet, encircling the lower part of the crown.

The description as regards the sentiments both of Mordecai and the city is worded so as to present a sharp contrast with that of the earlier condition of affairs (Esther 3:15, Esther 4:1).

shouted] The Heb. verb denotes joy audibly expressed. Thus the A.V.’s ‘rejoiced’ is inadequate.

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 15. - Royal apparel of blue and white. The Persian monarch himself wore a purple robe and an inner vest of purple striped with white ('Ancient Monarchies,' vol. 4. pp. 153, 154). The robes of honour which he gave away were of many different colours, but generally of a single tint throughout (Xen., 'Cyrop.,' 8:3, § 3); but the one given to Mordecai seems to have been blue with white stripes. These were the colours of the royal diadem (Q. Curt., 'Vit. Alex.,' 3:3). A great crown of gold. Not a tall crown, like that of the monarch, which is called in Hebrew kether (Greek κίταρις), but 'atarah, a crown of an inferior kind, frequently worn by nobles. And with a garment of fine linen and purple. The "fine linen" was of course white. The real meaning of the word thakrik, translated "garment," is doubtful. Gesenius understands an outer garment' 'the long and flowing robe of an Oriental monarch;" in which case the "apparel" previously mentioned must be the inner vest. Others, as Patrick, make the thakrik to be the inner, and the "apparel" (l'bush) the outer garment. The Septuagint, however, translates thakrik by διάδημα, and its conjunction with the "crown" favours this rendering. The diadem proper of a Persian monarch was a band or fillet encircling the lower part of his crown, and was of blue, spotted or striped with white. Ahasuerus seems to have allowed Mordecai to wear a diadem of white and purple. The city of Shushan rejoiced. As the Susanchites had been "perplexed" at the first edict (Esther 3:15), so were they "rejoiced" at the second. Such of them as were Persians would naturally sympathise with the Jews. Even the others may have disliked Haman's edict, and have been glad to see it, practically, reversed. Esther 8:15

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

The joy experienced throughout the kingdom at these measures. Esther 8:15. After transacting with the king this measure so favourable to the Jews, Mordochai went out from the king in a garment of deep blue and white material (comp. Esther 1:6), and with a great crown of gold, and a mantle of byssus and purple. תּכריך, ἁπ. λεγ., in the Aramaean תּכריכא, a wide mantle or covering. The meaning is not, as Bertheau remarks, that he left the king in the garment which had been, according to Esther 6:8., presented to him, nor that he left him with fresh tokens of his favour, clothed in a garment, crown, and mantle just bestowed on him, but that he left him in a magnificent state garment, and otherwise festally apparelled, that he might thus show, even by his external appearance, the happiness of his heart. Of these remarks, the first and last are quite correct; the second, however, can by no means be so, because it affords no answer to the question how Mordochai had obtained crown and mantle during his stay with the king and in the royal palace. The garments in which Mordochai left the king are evidently the state garments of the first minister, which Mordochai received at his installation to his office, and, as such, no fresh token of royal favour, but only his actual induction in his new dignity, and a sign of this induction to all who saw him issue from the palace so adorned. "The city of Susa rejoiced and was glad," i.e., rejoiced for gladness. The city, i.e., its inhabitants on the whole.