As far as biblical heroines go, Esther was relatively low-maintenance and docile. She did not take up arms or slay any enemies. For much of her life, she lived quietly amid the sandy flats and cypress trees of ancient Persia (now mainly Iran), pretending to be Christian. An orphan, she was raised by her older cousin Mordecai, who coached her to conceal her faith in an age of religious persecution.

Esther, the story goes, was such a looker she wound up marrying King Ahasuerus, who ruled an empire that stretched from India to Ethiopia, between 486-465 B.C. He had no idea that she was Jewish. But then everything changed when Haman, the king’s adviser, conceived a plot to eradicate the Jews of Persia. Esther was stirred to action, believing she existed precisely “for such a time as this.” Risking her life, she confessed to the king that she was not Christian after all, and she persuaded him to save her people.

You might not instinctively pair Queen Esther with Rembrandt van Rijn, the Dutch master who invented realism in the 17th century. Yet “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt,” a delectably wonky show at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, explores a little-known chapter in art history when artists of the Dutch Golden Age made a cult of Esther’s exemplary story. Though timed to coincide with Purim, the Jewish holiday that celebrates Esther and begins at sundown on Thursday, the show is likely to appeal to anyone who cares about painting. Rembrandt is represented by three paintings and a half dozen etchings, and the show also includes memorable works by his pupil Aert de Gelder and the two Jans (Steen and Lievens). It argues that the Dutch people found in the story of Esther a potent symbol of their own plight at a time when they were struggling for independence from the Spanish monarchy.

Rembrandt was not Jewish, but has long been considered a friend of the Jews. Scholars consider it significant that and his wife, Saskia, lived on the periphery of Amsterdam’s Vlooienburg, then the epicenter of immigrant life. Its residents were mostly Portuguese and Spanish Jews who had moved to Holland to escape the violence unleashed by the Inquisition. Rembrandt found both friends and models among his neighbors.

The show opens on a sumptuous note. Rembrandt’s “Jewish Heroine From the Hebrew Bible,” is sequestered in a small antechamber of its own, and if you ever sought to be alone with a Rembrandt (or a queen), here is your chance. It’s a radiant painting, done when the artist was 27 and already way ahead of the pack. He depicts Esther as a Dutch matron, in a crimson velvet dress, her face and hands glowing against the fuzzy shadows that enfold her. Her elderly maidservant stands behind her, combing her ginger-colored hair. Scholars have wondered how to interpret her protruding stomach. Is she pregnant, or is she merely a little heavy?

The image can seem surprising, because if you went to Sunday school, you were taught that King Ahasuerus first laid eyes on Esther when he picked her out of a beauty pageant. Yet Rembrandt has turned the former Miss Persia into a doughy presence. You suspect it was part of his quest to make painting feel more real. He wanted to liberate art from the giraffe necks and elongated limbs, the glittering elegance and artifice, with which his Mannerist predecessors had depicted women.

Who can deny that his Esther is arresting? As she sits in her room appearing pensive, she makes thinking itself feel like a dramatic activity. It’s as if the here-and-now has broken into the sealed container of a biblical tale, infusing it with air and atmosphere. A carpet of shadow on the floor seems to be thickening as we watch.

One wishes there were more Rembrandts in the show. His two best-known paintings relating to Esther, “Ahasuerus and Haman at the Feast of Esther” (1660) and “Haman Prepares to Honor Mordecai” (1665), are owned by museums in Russia, which in recent years has declined to lend to exhibitions in this country. (The two paintings are reproduced on wall labels in the current show, prompting you to think, “Thanks a lot, Putin.”)

Fortunately, the show includes a rarely loaned masterwork from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait, Age 23” (1629) which has nothing to do with Queen Esther, but let’s not nitpick. It’s one of the most magnetic paintings ever, bringing us face to face with the young Rembrandt, a beautiful boy with long, curly hair and an olive-green cap, stepping out from deep shadow with his lips slightly parted, as if he is about to speak to us from inside the painting’s gold frame.

WHAT MAKES A PAINTING persuasively real? Rembrandt stripped away the clutter of daily life to emphasize the basic existential aloneness of people. But other artists in the show, even his students, went the opposite way and filled up their scenes with housewares and domestic trimmings rendered in fastidious detail. In depicting the Book of Esther, they alighted repeatedly on the feast scene, or banquet, perhaps to indulge a newly prosperous society fond of scenes of eating and drinking and material bounty.

Jan Steen, master of the messy Dutch home, painted three versions of Esther’s feast. They’re reunited in the current show for the first time in decades, and they situate Esther in a context that can feel less like a biblical moment than an episode of “I Love Lucy.” In “The Wrath of Ahasuerus” (circa 1670), the king — angered, his eyes bulging — rises from his chair to ball out Haman, causing dishes to fly. Dinner — a peacock pie festooned with the bird’s feathers and displayed on an ornate silver platter — is depicted in midair as it slides toward the floor. It’s the most Dutch scene ever, complete with shards of broken porcelain glinting on the tile floor, and the obligatory long-eared spaniel yapping his head off in the foreground.

Organized by Abigail Rapoport, the curator at the Jewish Museum, and Michele L. Frederick, a curator at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, the show will remain in New York through Aug. 10, before traveling to Raleigh and later, in a condensed form, to the Gardner Museum in Boston. It contains 124 objects, including housewares by anonymous craftsman that relate scenes from Esther’s life on ceramic tiles, woven chair cushions and carved oak cabinets. There are also ceremonial objects, including silver Purim cups and historic Esther scrolls, that are likely to interest mainly historians of Judaica.

But do artists today ever think about Esther? The show includes only a single contemporary work: Fred Wilson’s “Queen Esther/Harriet Tubman” (1992), a small ink-on-acetate monotype that unites two women who obviously never met. A photograph of Tubman, the American abolitionist who helped enslaved people escape on the Underground Railway, is superimposed on an old engraving of Esther, to create a pithy double portrait that asserts a bond between a Black woman and a Jewish woman who did not lack for courage.

Hung in the middle of a room of 17th-century Dutch works, “Queen Esther/Harriet Tubman” makes one wish the museum had made more of an effort, perhaps in a catalog essay, to define Queen Esther’s relevance to contemporary culture.

We were given an example in October. Kamala Harris’s pastor, speaking in a Sunday sermon at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Georgia, made front-page news when he read aloud from the Book of Esther and compared the Democratic candidate for president to the Persian queen. “You were born to lead a nation,” the pastor said, and then added, “you were born for such a time as this.”

That phrase, “such a time as this,” might seem to point to a specific set of circumstances. But we leave the show feeling that any time — whether amid the ancient sands of the Persian Empire, or the bustle of Rembrandt’s Amsterdam, or even the upheavals of the present — is a good time to prove that ordinarypeople can do extraordinary things.

The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt

Through Aug. 10 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; (212)-423-3200; thejewishmuseum.org.