Purim, celebrated this year from March 23rd to the 25th, is a spring festival; a noisy and joyful celebration in the Jewish community. For local businesses, it’s also an opportunity to sell Hamantaschen. Receiving Call Your Mother’s annual “Hamantaschen Time” notice sparked memories of when I, as a child, starred in a synagogue play as the queen who saved the Jews from an evil plot.
I also wondered if the story of Queen Esther and the evil Haman has lessons for today. I asked Forest Hills neighbor David Bardin, who has written for us about another Jewish holiday, to give us his take on Purim. I caught him at just the right moment. – Marlene Berlin
Jacob L. Wright, professor of Hebrew Bible at Emory University in Atlanta, recently published an acclaimed book called Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins (Cambridge University Press). It is on The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2023” list (an “often brilliant and persuasive book,” the review says, about what’s “so much a losers’ tale.”) Wright’s book also won the Association of American Publishers 2024 Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) Award in the Theology and Religious Studies category. Wright focuses on the mostly-anonymous scribes in two Jewish kingdoms – Israel to the north and Judah to the south – and in the Diaspora.
Why the Bible Began ascribes importance to the biblical Book (or Scroll) of Esther, calling it “perhaps the most biblical book.” Wright shows how the Book of Esther distinguishes a people from a state – in other words, a population with ostensible common origins and/or concerns that can survive imperial conquests of their kingdoms.
The Book of Esther, which Jews recite during Purim, is set in the ancient Persian empire, a huge expanse which had 127 provinces – “from India to Ethiopia.” The story sets out a genocidal plot by the emperor’s vizier Haman, instigated against a minority group that he does not name, but it is all the Jewish communities scattered throughout the empire. In the end, it is Queen Esther (not the deity) who subverts this plot and brings victory to the Jews, her people.
In the Book of Esther, a confused and fickle emperor authorizes Haman to have this unnamed minority group slaughtered and their property plundered. Esther, a young beauty who did not identify herself as a Jew when she had gotten that same emperor to appoint her queen, foils the villain’s plot with her effective appeal to the emperor-king at a feast she organizes for him and Haman.
Although the emperor-king does not revoke the genocidal decree, he authorizes Jews throughout his empire to fight back in self defense, which they do successfully.
The Book of Esther shows how a group could lose wars, and yet survive. Its authors, like those responsible for the biblical corpus as a whole, admitted defeat. Indeed, they made this the point of departure for something entirely new. Their kingdoms were gone. They had lost king, army, fortifications, palaces, temple. They were able to see their situation for what it was (in contrast to many in their own communities and many other conquered peoples that surrounded them), and because they did, they were able to forge a roadmap for a new future.
In the Book of Esther, Jews had a “power deficit,” as did women vis-à-vis men in their society. But, led by a woman, Jews overcame a plot to annihilate them. Reading the book today, one naturally views those Jews in relation to Palestinian Arabs who suffer a similar power deficit. What lessons might both Israelis and Palestinians learn today from this book? If obstacles can be overcome, what win-win innovations might they invent?