God's Saving Hand Remembered at Purim

The feast of Purim began last night. Purim celebrates God's protection of Israel in Persia during the OT Captivity. Today would be a good day to reread the Book of Esther. You might be interested to learn Iran placed The Tomb of Mordecai & Esther on their National Historical Site list in 2008. That's a little mind boggling to consider. You can read about the site here. To read about the modern celebration of Purim in Israel click here.

 "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?" Then Esther told them to reply to Mordecai,  "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 4:14-16]

In Megillat Esther: The Masoretic Hebrew Text, Robert Gordis comments:
"Anti-Semites have always hated the book, and the Nazis forbade its reading in the crematoria and the concentration camps. In the dark days before their deaths, Jewish inmates of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belsen wrote the Book of Esther from memory and read it in secret on Purim.  Both they and their brutal foes understood its message."  Imagine... they were sick, abused, malnourished, overworked and facing death ... yet they were able to reconstruct an entire book of Scripture from memory.  It's a sad commentary on our modern culture when so many professed believers claim they just can't memorize God's Word... it's too hard for them. May we never experience a day when we wish we had taken the time to memorize it.