This was originally written for LRBC for June 11 2023
I recently shared the story of Queen Vashti with one of my daughters. Vashti was a Persian queen who appears in the Bible (book of Esther, chapter 1). Vashti is famous for her refusal to present herself to the king—her husband—at a banquet. The king was “merry with wine” and wanted to show off her beauty to the people at his banquet. For her disobedience, Vashti is deposed as his queen and ultimately replaced by Esther, who has her own story.
Why exactly I shared this story with my daughter evades my memory, but I recall that it was shared in jest to see what kind of reaction it would provoke.
Justifiably, she sided with Vashti, but I prodded her (again, in jest) with the question of whether Vashti maybe should have done as she was told.
She was a little puzzled.
On second thoughts she wondered which Bible character in the story was in the right—after all, neither of them were obvious “baddies”, and kings are meant to be obeyed rather than humiliated, right? Maybe Vashti should have done what she was told, she wondered.
The conversation with my daughter took a more serious (and unplanned) turn here.
Setting aside the rights and wrongs of the domestic dispute between this Persian royal couple, this story provided the opportunity to answer a slightly different question: why don’t we endorse the behaviour shown by the king? After all, most times and cultures would support the king in his rebuke of his disobedient and embarrassing wife.
We today, in a country like New Zealand, very easily side with Vashti against her boorish and powerful husband.
What has made our culture different?
There were two verses that I shared in our brief talk while doing the after-dinner dishes.
One was Genesis 1, which teaches that every human is made as reflecting and representing God (even post-fall) and thereby has dignity and value. This is grounds for reciprocal humility and for treating others with respect regardless of race or class or ability or gender.
The second text I told her about was Ephesians 5:25, where the Apostle Paul instructs husbands to love their wives just as Christ loved the church and sacrificially gave himself up for her.
It is the legacy of influence of biblical texts like these that has shaped western culture—even as it sheds its Christian heritage—in such a way that we typically don’t tolerate the kind of attitude the king displayed toward his wife. Nor does our culture approve of degrading treatment of women in general, (such as the story recounted by a young Auckland waitress in this recent New Zealand Herald article—sorry it’s paywalled). This is a fruit of the (metaphorical) tree that is rooted in a biblical view of relationships between human beings equally sharing in the dignity that comes with being made in the image of God.
Our current western culture values the fruits of this but has done away with the roots that nourish it.
Forget the question of whether Vashti should have done as she was told. Better to ask whether the King should have told his wife as he did—and ask the question of why most people today think he shouldn’t have.
Within the sphere of humanity that belongs to God’s new society (the church) biblical texts like these are reasons which ought to compel as well as inspire men to treat women better than might be seen in the society around them.
We can’t speak for our wider society at large, but this at least is why we—we who acknowledge the Father as Creator and the Christ as Lord and the Spirit as our Helper—don’t treat our wives as this Persian king treated his.
Chris Northcott 