My new biblical hero is Queen Vashti. We don’t hear much about her, but she’s the predecessor of Queen Esther. While the king was busy partying with all his drunk friends, she threw her own party for the women of the kingdom. His party lasted at least 7 days! Yikes! It doesn’t say whether hers went on that long or not. On that fateful seventh day, he sends word to her that he wants her to come and parade around in front of his drunk friends. Apparently, she’s quite a looker and he wants to show her off. Who knows, given the fact that they’d all been drinking for seven days, she might have been asked to strip down and show off ALL her beauty. Queen Vashti refused. And well she SHOULD have! What self-respecting woman would want to prance around in front of a bunch of drunk, ogling, lecherous men? You go girl!
Well, it seems the men of the kingdom didn’t take well to a woman with backbone, so they advised the king to dump her like a hot potato. And, fool that he is, he listened to them. Here she is, kicked out of the kingdom on her rump, because she had to nerve to stand up to her nincompoop of a husband. He was afraid other women would learn from her example and start standing up to their husbands just like she had. (Little did he know that his next wife would have a backbone too! Ha! It served him right!)
There’s no more word of what happened to Vashti. She leaves in disgrace and the biblical recorders just forgot about her in their haste to tell Esther’s story. Now if it had been WOMEN writing the Bible, they might have said something about where she ended up and if, perhaps, she managed to find a husband who paid her a little RESPECT. I doubt it though. Disgraced like that, she probably lived out her days in obscurity and loneliness. It makes me want to make up a new story for Vashti… that she moved away and started a kingdom where WOMEN ruled!!!