TLDR: I hate Esther (or, the Perils of Privilege)

In the Bible, there are two women with stories significant enough to merit their own books.  In a culture where men were the ones writing and women had quite specific roles to fulfil, any named woman in the Bible is worth paying attention to.  One is Ruth; the story of a young widow from the wrong country, the wrong religion, speaking the wrong language, who passes up re-marrying to become a benefits scrounger in order to provide for her ageing mother-in law.  And yeah it ends well, but that that lady has gumption.  I like gumption!

The other is Esther.  Whom I hated.  For years.

Held up as the model of ideal womanhood, Esther appeared to be your Actual Disney Princess, and I mean that in the most scathing way possible.  Plucked from obscurity because of her astounding good looks and apparently nothing else, Esther is made Head Queen of the Xerxes, King of Persia.  Tipped off by her uncle, a minister, she saves the king from assassination, earns a spot in his good books, and later uses this to wine and dine him into awarding the Jewish people the right to defend themselves in a society where they are outcasts and refugees.  The Jewish festival of Purim celebrates her story, being told much like a pantomime, with cheering and booing and 'he's behind you'.
Beauty Queen, actual queen, national hero, Esther was annoyingly perfect.  She was that cute, perky girl from school who managed to be captain of the netball team, head girl, and never without a boyfriend all at the same time.

For teenage me, the moral of this story was that being pretty will get you more or less anywhere.  Which is peachy... if you're pretty.  Which teen me (and sometimes adult me) was not always convinced of all.  Way to make a girl resentful, Bible.  Congrats.

Now I am a decade older, a lot more comfortable with myself, and therefore able to be a little less self-interested, I have to admit something.  I may have misjudged Esther a tiny wee bit.  But not in the way I thought...

Jacob Wrestles 2: The One Who Struggles

Uncle Laban seems a decent enough guy, and even gives his nephew a job as a herdsman.  Jacob settles in to watch the flocks... and also to watch Rachel, Laban's younger daughter.  Older sister Leah might not be much of a looker but Jacob thinks that Rachel is the cat's pajamas and offers Laban seven years of labour to pay the dowry he doesn't have and make Rachel his wife.

Seven years is a long time.

TLDR: Jacob Wrestles

Night has fallen in the wilderness.  Beneath dim moonlight there's not much to be seen, and only the soft rushing babble of water somewhere down the bank.  A man sits by the river, his mind like the landscape, full of darkness and the inexorable coming of tomorrow.

Now he stands; a figure is approaching.  He's hard to make out, a shadow among shadows.  Is he a tall man?  Does he come as a friend?  Are there more following him?  
Perhaps these questions are asked, but they go unanswered as the two men fall, somehow, to grappling with each other.  Hooking limbs with feet and clinching necks with stubborn arms.  They wrestle to throw, to try and take the other to the ground and overpower him.  The river's rush is forgotten amidst grunts and panting and the sounds of grasping hands and flesh on hair.

Hours pass   This was not what the waiting man had intended, to spent the entire night contesting with a stranger (Is he a stranger?  He's no longer sure.  Can you be so close to someone for so long without beginning to know them?) when he has so much occupying his mind.  

He does not want to DO this now.  He could surrender.  He could stop the fight, and try to deal or negotiate.  But something in him knows it's pointless.  They aren't even speaking.  There are no tricks left that he can play, nowhere left to run.  He plants his feet, pushes back, and despite the ache in his bones, and the hollows under his eyes, he stays.  He endures.  He does what is before him.  He wrestles.