Women in the Bible

Empowering Women Through Scripture

Old Testament
New Testament
Studies
- Bible Studies
Interviews
- Interviews
Resources
Español

Vashti

Esther 1:9-19; 2:1, 4, 17

*Also mentioned in the Apocrypha (see Apocryphal Women)

List of Reading & Resources:

Articles

“Vashti: Bible” by Sidnie White Crawford and Joshua Aaron Alfaro in Jewish Women’s Archive (June 23, 2021)
“Vashti and Esther: A Feminist Perspective” by Wendy Amsellem on My Jewish Learning .com
“Esther and Vashti: The Real Story” blog post by Rachel Held Evans (January 9, 2012)
“How Vashti Made Queen Esther Possible” by Erica Brown in Washington Jewish Week (March 4, 2020)

Apocryphal Resources

"Vashti: Bible" by Sidnie White Crawford, updated by Joshua Aaron Alfaro
"The Greek Book of Esther" by Adele Reinhartz in Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (1998)

To correctly use the search bar, follow these guidelines:

Use proper capitalization (for example, capitalize “N” in “Naomi” instead of writing “naomi”)
Use proper spacing (“Mary of Bethany” as opposed to “MaryofBethany”)
Write out the full name of the woman you’re searching for, if you know it (for example, “The Samaritan Woman”). If writing out the full name does not work, simply type in “Samaritan” and see if “The Samaritan Woman” appears.
If the search bar is still not yielding your results, it might be because we have altered the woman’s name based on scholarship we found (for example, we have Naomi listed as “Naomi/Mara”). You can always find a specific woman by going to the navigation bar, clicking Old Testament or New Testament, and scrolling down to her appropriate genre and book.
To find a woman manually, note that the women listed on this site are listed in the order they appear in scripture (for example, women in Genesis chapter 1 are listed before women in Genesis chapter 2).

This project has been created by Founder and Executive Director Debbie McLeod alongside a team of Yale-educated researchers: Anna Grace Glaize, McKenzie Brummond, Moriah Asch, Brian Peterson, Laura Traverse, Phoebe Oler, and Sarah Ambrose