Getting Biblical in Daily Life
Jewish Queen convinces Persian King not to allow his evil counselor to commit genocide against the Jewish people, getting the counselor killed and making her uncle the new counselor in the process. So what's missing in this picture? Considering that this is the Bible, theologians would probably say "um, how about God?"
But God isn't mentioned in the Book of Esther. Crazy, right? Esther is the only book in the Bible—aside from The Song of Songs—that doesn't explicitly mention the Big Guy. Yet, this was easily remedied as people tried to look for the working of God behind the scenes. Why doesn't Mordecai bow down to Haman? Because he only owes his allegiance to God, of course. At least, that's the way a religious person would probably be inclined to interpret the story.
The writer of Esther very well may have thought that, but on the other hand he or she might've just be trying to tell a dope story with lots of court intrigue and killing. That's part of the theological mystery of Esther. It's sort of a Rorschach Test; you either see a deeper message in it, or you see a fairly entertaining and fundamentally pretty secular story.
Jewish tradition, up to the present day, states that the story does have something to do with God. In fact, the mystical explanations of Kabbalists get quite intense. The whole story becomes an allegory for the soul's attempt to reach God while also struggling to redeem humanity from the threats of evil powers. However, most Jewish interpreters don't go quite as far. They just look for the Will of God in between the lines.
Plus, there's another version of Esther—not the one contained in most Bibles—from the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), which has chapters added in at a later date that try to give God a bigger role in the stories. For example, it includes a chapter where Mordecai and Esther pray for God's intervention. This goes to show that some people weren't content to just see God implied in the story. They wanted to flesh out his role, give it more weight.