The book of Esther opens with a feast that has been going on for seven days. The king is merry with wine, his nobles are drinking with him, and he wants to show off his queen. He sends for Vashti.
She says no (Esther 1:12).
In the text, this is a domestic refusal. In the empire, it becomes a constitutional crisis. The king’s advisors push for a royal decree requiring all women in the realm to honor their husbands, because they understand what one woman’s no could set in motion:
“For this deed of the queen shall come abroad unto all women, so that they shall despise their husbands in their eyes” (Esther 1:17).
They knew something Vashti may not have calculated. Her refusal was already changing what other women thought was possible.
Dr. Cynthia James and Yana Connor, hosts of Humble Hermeneutic, use this story to open up a question worth sitting with: how did women in the Bible gain power? The answer is not what you might expect, and it is not simple.
Vashti Was Not Rebelling. She Was Settled.
In the church, the traditional reading of Vashti is a warning. She defied her husband and suffered for it. Preachers have used her as a cautionary tale about women who do not submit.
James and Connor read her differently. Vashti was not looking for a fight. She had her own gathering (Esther 1:9). She had her own life. The king called her to leave what she was doing, come to his party and be displayed before his guests as if she were a trophy rather than a person. She said no.
“What Queen Vashti for me sort of represents is not allowing anyone to treat you as less than you are. If you believe that you are a person created in the image of God, then you move in the world and demand that people treat you that way.”
— Yana Connor
That is the frame these teachers bring. Vashti moved from a settled identity. She knew who she was. The refusal was not rebellion for its own sake. She had internalized her own dignity as someone made in God’s image, and she acted from that place when the moment demanded it.
The text itself does not editorialize. It does not say Vashti was right or wrong. It just shows what happened. But what happened next tells you something. The king’s advisors did not respond with irritation. They responded with fear.
Why Did One Woman’s No Frighten an Empire?
This is the question James and Connor press hardest, and the answer is worth pausing on.
The advisors pushed for a kingdom-wide edict requiring all women to honor their husbands. A royal decree covering the whole empire is not a proportionate response to one woman declining to leave her own gathering. The overreaction is its own testimony. They understood that women’s agency, once acted on, could reshape the social order. They moved with urgency because they knew how contagious one woman’s refusal could be.
“How amazing it is that others see women sometimes with more power than we may see ourselves. Her one action could send a universal ripple, and I don’t know that we think of ourselves as people who really move the world with a choice or not.”
— Dr. Cynthia James
This observation cuts in more than one direction. It is a word about how women’s power has been suppressed: not because it was absent but because it was perceived as threatening. The edict was out of proportion to the act but in proportion to the threat the advisors feared. The history of silencing and limiting women in institutions, including the church, is often read as evidence that women have less power. James reads it the other way: the suppression is a measure of the power that was feared.
Dr. Emerson Powery, in his work on how marginalized communities read Scripture, makes a similar structural point. Those with the least formal power often have the clearest view of what the powerful are protecting. The king’s advisors saw Vashti’s power before Vashti calculated it herself. That is not an accident. It is a pattern.
Source: How Did Enslaved People Read the Bible (Emerson Powery)
When Do You Assert Your Dignity and When Do You Endure?
Here the conversation gets genuinely hard, and the teachers do not smooth it over.
Vashti said no and lost her position. That cost is real. It cannot be spiritualized away. She exercised her dignity and paid for it. The text leaves a question open, and James and Connor sit with it honestly: was that the right moment? That question has no clean answer.
James draws a parallel to women in the civil rights movement who chose to stay in rooms where they were being disrespected. They absorbed the indignity and built the influence that eventually moved institutions. Rosa Parks is remembered for the day she refused to give up her seat, but she had been organizing, training and absorbing smaller costs for years before that moment came. The refusal was not impulsive. It was the fruit of a long, strategic patience.
Connor names this tension from the inside:
“I live in a fallen world. But God created me to be Black and female, and that was a very intentional choice. In that, I need to bear both the burdens and the joy of being Black and female in America. Sometimes I have to put the interest of others before my own.”
— Yana Connor
She describes navigating predominantly white seminaries and church contexts as a Black woman. That means constant calculations about when to assert, when to ask rather than state and when to absorb a wrong for the sake of staying in the room. She does not frame that as weakness. She frames it as a particular kind of wisdom, a dying to self. It is done for the sake of others who need a voice in that room, not for the sake of the institution that made the room uncomfortable.
This is where Sherelle Ducksworth’s work on Scripture, race and gender connects. Navigating spaces built by and for others requires a reading of both the moment and the text that is more sophisticated than either simple assertion or simple submission. The women of the Bible these teachers most admire are not women who never paid a cost. They are women who knew who they were and moved accordingly.
Source: Can You Trust the Bible When It’s Been Used Against You (Sherelle Ducksworth)
Esther: The Other Mode
The book continues with Esther, and the contrast the teachers draw between Esther and Vashti is instructive. They are not two different kinds of women. They are two modes of the same underlying identity. Both knew they were made in God’s image and acted from that foundation in circumstances that demanded different things.
Esther moves inside a constrained situation. She does not have Vashti’s option to simply refuse. She is inside the palace, inside the king’s household and inside a dangerous political moment. She uses what she has: access, timing and an understanding of how to move in a court she did not build. She fasts for three days before she goes to the king. She does not act alone. She calls her community into prayer and sacrifice before she steps into danger (Esther 4:16).
And she changes history from inside a system she did not choose.
Both modes, Vashti’s direct refusal and Esther’s strategic patience, are present in Scripture. Neither is presented as the universal model. Both cost something. The question is not which is always right. The question is which the moment calls for, and whether you have the settled identity to know the difference.
What the Bible Is Actually Saying About Women and Power
The teachers return at the end to the foundation the text itself provides:
“She is my heroine in the text. She has her own audience, and she appears to be content with that. He’s saying, leave what you’re doing and come over here and be sport for what I’m doing. And there’s something about us learning how to be true to our agendas.”
— Dr. Cynthia James
Women gaining power in the Bible is rarely about acquiring formal authority, though that appears too. Deborah judged Israel (Judges 4:4). Huldah authenticated the Book of the Law (2 Kings 22:14–20). Priscilla taught Apollos (Acts 18:26). What appears more consistently is women who operate from a settled sense of who they are and whose they are. They refuse to be defined entirely by the systems around them. From that place, they move the story forward in ways the powerful cannot predict and cannot fully stop.
The imago Dei is not theoretical. It is the ground from which both Vashti and Esther move. And it is the ground from which anyone who wants to read the Bible honestly about women has to start.
Quick Answers
Why did Vashti refuse the king’s request? The text does not give her reason directly. James and Connor read it as a refusal to be objectified. She was hosting her own gathering and was not willing to leave it to be put on display as if she were a possession rather than a person.
Was Vashti wrong? The teachers note that the traditional reading uses her as a warning. They read her differently, as a woman acting from her identity as someone made in God’s image. The text does not editorialize. What it shows is that one woman’s refusal was threatening enough to require a kingdom-wide response.
How does the response to Vashti reveal something about power? The empire’s overreaction, a royal decree covering all women in all provinces, matches the threat the advisors feared. Historically, the suppression of women’s voices is a measure of how powerful those voices were perceived to be.
Does the Bible show women gaining power through submission or through assertion? Neither alone. Vashti and Esther act from the same foundation, a settled identity as image-bearers of God, and express it differently in different circumstances. The Bible holds both modes.
Hear the Full Conversation
This discussion is from the Humble Hermeneutic episode “How Did Women in the Bible Gain Power?” Dr. Cynthia James is a scholar, preacher and theological educator. Yana Connor is a theologian and ministry leader whose work sits at the intersection of Scripture, culture and the experience of Black women in the church. Listen at humblehermeneutic.podbean.com.
