15th March 2019 • Simon Eder •
There is much to be said for the argument that the overarching theme of the Tanach is God’s relationship with Israel. So many books of the Hebrew Bible address their covenant. This begins of course in Exodus when God liberates his people from slavery and continues through II Kings. Much can then be inferred about both divine and human hopes for a new beginning from the pre, exilic and post-exilic prophets. The Book of Esther’s concern is also with the collective destiny of the nation. We may even trace a certain mimicking of the very foundation myth of the nation in the book. The decree of extermination in the Book of Esther closely resembles that of Pharaoh against the male infants of the Israelites. Both Exodus and Esther therefore tell the story of the death of the people averted.
There is of course one central difference in the Book of Esther and it is indeed a difference which sets Esther apart from every other book of the Bible in the fact that God’s name is entirely absent.
The Book of Esther is certainly decidedly secular in tone. In fact the prayer that is traditionally recited on Purim:
We thank you for the miracles, for the redemption, for the mighty deeds, for the deliverances and for the wars that you performed for our ancestors in those days at this season… In the days of Mordechai and Esther, in Shushan… And You in your abundant mercy, annulled his (Haman’s) counsel, frustrated his intention, and brought his evil plan upon his own head.
is somewhat anathema to the Megillah itself. The nation is referred to as an ethnic as opposed to a religious group for example. Esther makes no effort to practice her faith. Even the response to Haman’s edict which is met by the Jews with “fasting, weeping and wailing and everybody lay(ing) in sackcloth and ashes” (Megillat Esther: 4: 3) is not accompanied as one might expect with a call to repentance or an appeal to the Almighty in prayer.
The prayer is however more akin to the Greek version of the Megillah, found in collections of the Apocrypha, where there are six additions totalling 107 verses which give the book a more religious atmosphere than in the original version. Mordecai for example is recast in the image of Joseph and Daniel as a recipient of divine revelation. Esther’s prayer in the Greek version. She laments the Jews’ existence in exile and blames their own sins for their desperate situation – “we have sinned against You and You have handed us over to our enemies”. She even protests about her intermarriage; “You know that I abhor the bed of the uncircumcised and of any foreigner”.
Perhaps most strikingly the Greek translator also corrects the lack of God’s name throughout by inputting it where it seems natural. For example when Esther becomes queen in the Greek version as in the Hebrew version she does not reveal her ancestry as Mordecai had implored but there is then further reasoning given: “for so Mordecai had commanded her, to fear God and to do his commandments, just as when she was with him; so Esther did not change her way of life” (2:20). Another such example is in the opening of Chapter 6 where in the Greek version “the Mighty One kept sleep from the king that night” and “if Mordecai is of the race of the Judeans…you will never be able to ward him off, because a living God is with him”
These embellishments are certainly a far cry from the original Hebrew version and are designed, as scholarship has shown, to be produced under the influence of Hasmonean Jerusalem with the aim of bringing normative Jewish ideology to the text – devotion to God, prayer, an abhorrence of intermarriage and affinity for Jewish law and practice.
All this shows that it is quite remarkable that the original Hebrew version was in fact included within the canon at all. It was certainly not universally accepted; the Book of Esther was the only book of the Hebrew Bible not to be found among the Dead Sea Scrolls perhaps because for the Qumran community intermarriage was a capital crime.
In many ways the Rabbinic tradition of reading into the text the voice of God, of which the prayer recited on Purim and referenced above is an example, is a continuation of the tradition of rewriting the Book by the Greek translators of Esther.
The Kabbalists, as Rabbi Jacobs reminds us in his Encyclopedia Judaica entry on Purim went a step further with their understanding of God at work behind the scenes in the Book. They even liken “the “lots” of Purim with the “lots” cast on the Day of Atonement (Lev 16:8), what human beings call “fate” or “luck” being in reality , only another manifestation of God’s providential care.”
What both the Rabbinic and Kabbalistic approach miss however is perhaps the underlying message that the original authors of the Hebrew text were trying to convey. What the Rabbis exegetical imaginations cloud is surely the importance of human action in the face of adversity rather than relying on divine intervention. Jack Miles in his book God: A Biography refers to both Mordecai and Esther as “God’s redemptive action incarnate. They do for the Jews under Ahasuerus what the Lord did for Israel under Pharaoh”. It is their autonomous and decisive action rather than appealing to God or waiting on His redemption that is the really powerful message of the Book of Esther and also what makes it so pertinent for today.