This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

These Mondays keep coming, don’t they? I hope Monday School takes some of the sting out of them for you! It’s STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday” and cheaper than liquor. If you ever find a better deal than that, jump on it!

Today’s Lesson: What’s The Deal With The Book Of Esther?

The Book of Esther is a work that belongs to the Ketuvim or “Wisdom Writings” – that part of the Judaic biblical canon that is neither part of the Torah (that is, the Pentateuch – the first five books) nor associated with the Prophets.

It is the only book in the Bible that doesn’t mention God or the Lord.

It’s also the only book in the Bible that DOES mention India.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “The book purports to explain how the feast of Purim came to be celebrated by the Jews. Esther, the beautiful Jewish wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus (Xerxes I), and her cousin Mordecai persuade the king to retract an order for the general annihilation of Jews throughout the empire. The massacre had been plotted by the king’s chief minister, Haman, and the date decided by casting lots (purim). Instead, Haman was hanged on the gallows he built for Mordecai; and on the day planned for their annihilation, the Jews destroyed their enemies. According to the Book of Esther, the feast of Purim was established to celebrate that day, but this explanation is surely legendary.”

Theodor H. Gaster’s Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament elaborates: “Scholars are virtually agreed… that the story is fiction rather than history. In the first place, none of the Persian kings who bore the names Xerxes (Ahasuerus) had a wife named Esther. Second, there is no mention anywhere except in the Book of Esther of a queen named Vashti, a vizier named Haman, or of a courtier named Mordecai who eventually replaced Haman. Third, there is no Hebrew, Aramaic, or Persian word pur denoting ‘lot’….” (p. 829). Gaster goes on to explain that Purim usually falls close to the vernal equinox (the beginning of spring), that the new year was often dated from the vernal equinox until very recent times, and that New Year’s Day is sometimes given the name phur in Arabic (which seems to have been derived from the Persian word for “first”). In his estimation, Purim probably was a Jewish festival derived from the ancient New Year’s celebration of a non-Jewish civilization. Kenneth C. Davis’s Don’t Know Much About The Bible: Everything You Need to Know About the Good Book but Never Learned essentially agrees when it describes Purim as “an ancient agricultural festival celebrating the arrival of spring” (p. 264).

Like many books of the Bible, Esther has flaws and oddities which reveal it to be an all-too-human a work and not the inspiration of a perfect God. In the words of Gaster, “It is to be noted, first, that the Book of Esther really consists of two stories now artificially linked together. The one is the story of Vashti; the other, that of Esther. Now, in each of them the central figure is a woman, and both revolve around the same central theme of how a beautiful woman outwits the designs of kings and princes…. They are, essentially, ‘Kaffee-klatsch’ talk at the expense of the menfolk. It is, accordingly, from a repertoire of such novellae that the Book of Esther may be supposed to have stemmed…. The stories have been linked together in the manner of most Oriental romances. They are enclosed in a general cadre of adventures at the court of the Great King. This is the kind of thing which one finds again in such well-known collections as the Pancatantra, the Twenty-five Vampire Tales (Vetalapanchavimsati) of Somadeva, and the Thousand and One Nights” (pp. 829-830).

Among several plot flaws Gaster points out are these three:

—– Queen Vashti is said to be deposed in the third year of King Ahasuerus’s reign while her replacement, Esther, is said to have been chosen in the seventh year of his reign – far too long an interval. The Syriac Version of the story recognized this problem and substituted “fourth year” for seventh.

—– King Ahasuerus approves Haman’s plan to kill all the Jews in Esther 3:10-11, yet when Esther reveals the plan to him in Esther 7:2-7 he’s ignorant of the plot, demands to know the name of whoever is responsible, and angry when he finds out.

—– Esther makes a big deal out of interceding with the king to save her people. When she finally does so and he grants her any wish she might ask, she fails to simply request “Save my people!” and instead asks the king and Haman to a couple of dinners! “Not only is the point of this procedure obscured, but it also remains unexplained why Haman could not just as well have been denounced in absentia” (p. 830).

Asimov’s Guide to the Bible provides more details as to the probable origins of this book. According to Asimov, virtually all the names of the chief characters derive from ancient non-Hebrew mythology. “Vashti” is the name of an Elamite goddess. “Esther” is the Aramaic form of Ishtar, a Babylonian goddess. “Mordecai” is similar to the name of the main Babylonian god, Marduk (which is rendered “Merodach” in Hebrew). Ishtar and Marduk were related in Babylonian mythology much as Esther and Mordecai are related in the Bible. The evil Haman is unmentioned by any historian but has a name suspiciously like that of the chief male deity of the Elamites – Hamman. Babylonia supplanted Elam and, as it did so, its gods supplanted Elam’s. That is to say, Ishtar replaced Vashti and Marduk replaced Hamman. This exactly parallels what happens in the Book of Esther.

Like most of the Bible, the Book of Esther does not make for pleasant reading unless you happen to be an extremely nationalistic Jew or a fundamentalist Christian. Asimov bluntly terms it a “savage” book, and so it is. As in the earlier books which detail the ancient Hebrews’s brutal conquest of Canaan, the Book of Esther celebrates the violent triumph of the Jews over their enemies. Haman and his ten sons are hanged – not won over or converted. The Jews throughout King Ahasuerus’s empire end up slaughtering some 75,000 of their enemies – a plot twist which may have thrilled long-suffering Jews the way a Commie-killing Rambo may have thrilled frustrated Americans in the 1980s but will tend to repulse those with more humanistic tastes. Thank goodness Asimov terms the bloody conclusion of Esther completely implausible and unrecorded anywhere outside the Bible!

It’s a wonder that the Book of Esther is even in the Bible. According to Davis’s Don’t Know Much About The Bible: Everything You Need to Know About the Good Book but Never Learned, “Esther was a latecomer to the Hebrew canon. The rabbis who fixed the canon of official Hebrew scriptures debated well into the fourth century CE whether this story, essentially a Hebrew Grimms’ fairy tale, belongs with the rest of the divine books…. God is a ‘no-show’…. There are no laws, miracles, prayers, or mention of Jerusalem. It’s not even a very moral story, concluding with a bloodbath….” (p. 263).

The Encyclopedia Britannica agrees when it says “The secular character of the Book of Esther (the divine name is never mentioned) and its strong nationalistic overtones made its admission into the biblical canon highly questionable for both Jews and Christians.”

The Britannica goes on to describe how the obvious flaws of Esther led some to tamper with its text. “Apparently in response to the conspicuous absence of any reference to God in the book, the redactors (editors) of its Greek translation in the Septuagint interspersed many additional verses throughout the text that demonstrate Esther’s and Mordecai’s religious devotion.” This sort of tampering seems to have occurred again and again in book after book of the Bible as people over the ages repeatedly tried to make it into what they thought it ought to be. The Britannica gives many examples of this in its other articles on specific books; William Harwood’s Mythology’s Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus is an excellent one-volume summary.

Interestingly, various religions and sects treat this tampering with Esther very differently. According to the Britannica, “These so-called Additions to the Book of Esther do not appear in the Hebrew Bible, are treated as canonical in Roman Catholic Bibles, and are placed in the Apocrypha in Protestant Bibles.” (Asimov says these additions “are so unrealistic as to detract still further from the possible historicity of the book.”)

The Britannica also says “Esther appears between Nehemiah and Job in the Protestant canon. In the Roman Catholic canon, Esther appears between Judith and Job and includes six chapters that are considered apocryphal in the Jewish and Protestant traditions.” Once again, a close examination of the Bible reveals that there really isn’t one Bible but many. Which Bible people believe in (if any) seems to be more a result of luck, culture, and upbringing than of logic, knowledge, or informed analysis. Those who continue to believe in a single, inerrant Bible seem willfully ignorant.

As for the Book of Esther itself…. I’m told that it’s still read by Jewish people every year as part of their Purim celebrations. I hope they’ll take the time to research it more thoroughly at least once in their lives.

I’m glad I did.

Hope you are, too! :-)