Introduction

OF THE SEVERAL BIBLICAL BOOKS that test the limits of the canon, Esther may well be the most anomalous. It is the only scriptural text of which no scrap has been uncovered at Qumran. The pious Dead Sea sectarians might well have looked askance at it not merely because it never mentions the name of God but also because its narrative world is fundamentally secular. The Jews of the Persian empire are said here to have different “rules” from their neighbors, but these rules—the Persian loanword dat is used, which means “regulation” or “governing decree”—are in no way identified as divine commandments, and issues of faith or covenant are not at all part of this story. Nor, quite notably, is the Land of Israel. The likely date of the book’s composition would be sometime late in the fifth century B.C.E. or perhaps slightly later: any date after the demise of the Persian empire in the fourth century is highly improbable because by then the fictional activities of a Persian court would have been of little interest to Hebrew audiences, and the abundant borrowings of Persian words would have been unintelligible. In all likelihood, then, the book was written not long after the return to Zion authorized by the Persian emperor Artaxerxes and led by Ezra and Nehemiah in the middle of the fifth century, but this momentous event does not exist for the author of Esther, who envisages life in the diaspora as a normal and even permanent condition.

The most unusual aspect of Esther, for a book that made it into the biblical canon, is that it offers strong evidence of having been written primarily for entertainment. It has variously been described as a farce, a burlesque, a satire, a fairy tale, and a carnivalesque narrative, and it is often quite funny, with sly sexual comedy playing a significant role. The portrait of King Ahasuerus and the Persian court makes no pretense of serious correspondence to historical reality, as the original audience surely must have known. The Persian emperors were famous for their tolerance toward ethnic minorities—a policy clearly enunciated in the Cyrus Cylinder—and so Ahasuerus’s accepting Haman’s plan to massacre all the Jews of the realm is a manifest fantasy. And though the repeated attention in the book to imperial bureaucratic procedure and the written document (ketav) as its principal instrument does reflect something about the Persian system of governance, and the emphasis on luxury and banquets also corresponds to what we know of the Persian court, there could have been no actual legal stipulation like the one mentioned here that all royal decrees were absolutely irrevocable.

Ahasuerus, although he consents to a genocidal scheme, is basically a well-meaning, often obtuse, figure of fun. He repeatedly has a dim sense of what is going on around him. In the early chapters, he barely speaks, instead following the counsel of his courtiers like a marionette, and to the end he is an easy mark for manipulation. The writer even introduces a couple of arch hints that may lead us to wonder about his virility as well as about his intelligence.

What could have motivated this sort of narrative invention? Political grounds for the satiric representation of a Persian emperor seem unlikely. Ahasuerus is assigned the role he plays because of the necessities of the gratifying national fantasy contrived by the writer. The reigning queen Vashti, unwilling to expose her female charms to the eyes of her husband’s drunken companions, must be removed, at the urging of one of those very companions, in order to make way for Esther, the beautiful Jewish commoner who becomes queen and saves her people. Her meteoric rise to royal grandeur, which then enables the ascent of her adoptive father Mordecai to the position of vice-regent, leans on the literary precedent of the Joseph story, as has often been observed. Here, however, the rags-to-riches story of Joseph is compounded by the threat to the lives of Mordecai, Esther, and all their people, and they must foil the plot of a nefarious enemy—said, altogether unrealistically, to be a descendant of Israel’s arch-enemies, the Amalekites—whom Mordecai at the end will replace as the king’s first minister.

Reversal is the key to the plot of Esther. In the first verse of chapter 9, this pattern is actually spelled out in two Hebrew words, wenahafokh huʾ, “on the contrary” or “it was the opposite.” Instead of Haman’s minions killing the Jews, it is the Jews who kill them. Instead of Mordecai’s being impaled on the stake that Haman has erected for him, it is Haman and then his sons who are executed and impaled. Instead of Haman parading in regal grandeur on the king’s own horse, it is Mordecai who is accorded that signal honor. And at the end, it is Mordecai, not Haman, who exercises power of the realm as vice-regent, adorned in regal finery. The carnivalesque character of the story is evident in all this. In the carnival, hierarchies are (temporarily) reversed; the lowly get to play the roles of those above them, typically through masks and costumes, as Mordecai, having donned sackcloth in the hour of impending disaster, appears at the end in indigo and white, a golden diadem, and a wrap of crimson linen. The penultimate chapter of the book is largely devoted to fixing the date and practice of the carnivalesque holiday of Purim (which generally falls in March, around the same time as Mardi Gras). While this chapter is often seen as an epilogue, it is quite possible that the entire story was invented in order to provide an as-if historical justification for a day of feasting and drinking and merrymaking, already embraced by the Jews, that has no warrant among the festivals stipulated in the Torah.

The peculiarities of the Book of Esther’s narrative world are matched by the peculiarities of its Hebrew style. As one would expect, it shows a number of the characteristics of Late Biblical Hebrew, with certain terms, as in other Late Biblical books, anticipating usages of the rabbinic Hebrew that would begin to emerge toward the end of the biblical period. But it should also be said that in contrast to other Late Biblical books, Esther exhibits a noticeable degree of stylistic looseness. Infinitives are often used where conjugated forms of the verb seem to be required, a procedure not evidenced elsewhere in Late Biblical Hebrew. Agreement between subject and verb is often ignored. The careful tense distinction of classical Hebrew between perfect and imperfect forms of the verb is entirely relaxed, and at some points the writer appears to be a little uncertain as to how to handle Hebrew verb tenses. And from time to time there are run-on sentences that sprawl over several verses without a great deal of syntactic coherence.

Yet, as novelists such as Balzac and Dreiser demonstrate, it is possible to tell a very effective story with a sometimes ragged style. The author of Esther, unlike his Hebrew predecessors in the First Commonwealth period, revels in catalogues of descriptive details and delights in invoking the pomp and luxury of the imperial court where Esther’s and Mordecai’s destiny of greatness will in the end be splendidly realized. Here, for example, at the very beginning, is the setting for the king’s “seven-day banquet in the garden court of the king’s pavilion—white linen, indigo cotton fastened with cords of fine crimson cloth on silver cylinders and marble columns, gold and silver couches on a paving of alabaster and marble, and mother-of-pearl and black pearl.” And beyond the descriptions, the writer deploys lively wit and an apt sense of comic timing in the dialogues that reveal a subtle Esther, a resolute Mordecai, a fumbling Ahasuerus, and a menacing but finally sputtering Haman. It is not hard to understand how this delightful story, devoid though it is of spiritual concerns and covenantal gravity, became canonical. It of course provided the warrant for a festive early spring celebration that few wanted to give up. But even apart from the holiday, as a story it was for its early audiences, as it would continue to be, both highly amusing and gratifying, at once a vivid satire and a tale of national triumph that offered to diaspora Jews a pleasing vision of safety from imagined enemies and a grand entrée to the corridors of power.