Esther

Esther and Purim

Purim ..glorifies the deceptions of Esther, who concealed her Jewish identity to seduce the King of Persia, then slyly tricked him into slaughtering 75,000 people deemed “enemies of the Jews. In other words, Purim celebrates Jews lying, secretly penetrating the highest levels of government, and manipulating the leaders of an empire into mass-murdering perceived “enemies of the Jewish people.”      Kevin Barrett 

The Book of Esther is the latest OT book to have been composed, written maybe in the first century AD:

1   *     It has no God, Yahweh has faded away - he’s gone forever.

2   *     There are no tribes of Israel, just scattered ‘Jews’ around the Persian Empire.
*    ‘The Jews’ have appeared, who did not exist or were never alluded to as such in the ancient world.

4   *     It has people being converted to Judaism, which did not happen and indeed was forbidden in earlier times. Judaism is here acquiring a non-tribal definition: Schlomo Sand in his Invention of the Jewish people, describes Judaism as a proselytising religion in the early centuries AD.

This story has evidently been composed in the aftermath of  an attempt to expel Jews, it’s a revenge tale concocted against someone who plots to do this. (Jews were expelled from Rome in AD19.) That did not happen in the ancient world.

It is a mock-history story projected back in time to the sixth century BCE at the Persian court (which gullible Christians believe). The king Ahasuerus here alluded to may have been the Persian king the Greeks called Xerxes,

The story of Esther centres around the Jewish festival of Purim, celebrated over the Full Moon just before the Spring Equinox, i.e.one month before the Passover full Moon. It was composed when that festival was in existence and explains it, like a Just-So story.

This book is characterised by sexual vindictiveness, boorish treatment of women and delight in mass murder. Supposedly a story of revenge, it more realitically concerns that archetypal theme of Jewish holy books, how to screw over a host culture. 

It starts off with a drunk King Ahasuerus ordering his beautiful wife to appear and show herself off before a bunch of strangers. His eunuchs convey his command:

 to bring Queen Vashti before the king with her royal crown, in order to show the peoples and the princes her beauty; for she was fair to behold. (1:11)

She refuses, so he divorces her and instead he takes a Jewish girl Esther to be his queen, with no idea of her background!  A command to ‘destroy all Jews’ is then imagined on the part of ‘Haman’ the king’s advisor, for a trivial reason viz that one Jew at the gate has refused to bow down before him. (Ch 3).

Haman declares to the King: 

 Then Haman said to King Ahasuerus, "There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom; their laws are different from those of every other people, and they do not keep the king's laws, so that it is not for the king's profit to tolerate them. 

That may have been a perception of the Jews in the first century AD, but could hardly apply to earlier centuries.

The tribes of Canaan, or Hebrews wandering across a desert, an angry god - these have becoce mere memories, and now they are just a people dispersed throughout the Persian Empire.

The king agrees, and as the charms of Esther start to work upon him, he gives her carte blanche:

And you may write as you please with regard to the Jews, in the name of the king, and seal it with the king's ring; for an edict written in the name of the king and sealed with the king's ring cannot be revoked."    (8:8)

What Jews like best

 ‘The Jews had light and gladness and joy and honour’ – only one thing would produce that! Yes it’s the mass murder of tens of thousands– including women and children - of the host nation which has been kindly looking after them for many years and putting up with their funny habits:

By these the king allowed the Jews who were in every city to gather and defend their lives, to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, with their children and women, and to plunder their goods, upon one day throughout all the provinces of King Ahasuerus,  (8:11)

What bliss! Twice we are told about a spreading ‘fear of the Jews’ which converted people to the faith:

And in every province and in every city, wherever the king's command and his edict came, there was gladness and joy among the Jews, a feast and a holiday. And many from the peoples of the country declared themselves Jews, for the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them. (8:15-17)

 the Jews gathered in their cities throughout all the provinces of King Ahasuerus to lay hands on such as sought their hurt. And no one could make a stand against them, for the fear of them had fallen upon all peoples.  (9:3)

Serve people right for hating them:

So the Jews smote all their enemies with the sword, slaughtering, and destroying them, and did as they pleased to those who hated them. (9:5)

Jews are supposed to get dead drink on Purim.