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Part II — Joshua to Revelation (1898)
The Book of Esther
The committee's real heroine here is Vashti, who refused to be displayed before the king's drunken court and lost her crown for it — 'she kept her state.' Esther's more accommodating path to power gets a cooler, comparative reading: two survival strategies under the same despotism.
Vashti's refusalThe king's decree that every man bear rule in his own houseEsther's strategy at courtThe politics of the harem