Our member ICfreely wrote dozens of posts mentioning the Book of Esther and the celebration of Purim. I agree the story of the vengeful slaughter of 75,000 Persian citizens, if taken literally, has no place in Christian spiritual life. And it has certainly done enough harm to the minds of those under the yoke of Talmudic Judaism.
Judaism has a litany of personages who it is incumbent on the believer to hate, from Amalek to Jesus, an eternal train of loathing. What a terrible burden for the mind and spirit of the individual Judaic to bear - this religious obligation to hate!
- Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, note on p. 585.
The story reads like a blueprint for the eternal Judaic persecution-revenge seesaw, the paradigm of intrinsic Judaic blamelessness, and the Trojan horse tactic of marrying one’s children into aristocracy as a way of directing events from the sidelines. As for persecution, real or imaginary, we have already seen how pivotal this paranoia is to the creation and survival of the Judaic identity. Prior to the advent of ‘atheistic Judaism’ and Holocaustianity, the Book of Esther no doubt ranked high as an identity booster.The book is inspired by a fierce nationalism and an unblushing vindictiveness which stand in glaring contradiction to the Sermon on the Mount.
- Bernhard W. Anderson, The place of the Book of Esther in the Christian Bible, 1950. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1198590
The idea that Haman would plot to slaughter all the Jews in the empire simply because Mordecai refused to bow down to him is puerile at best. Haman himself gives a much more believable reason for restricting the Jews’ freedom, expelling them from the land or converting them (but obviously not for killing them), though it is supposed to be a mere pretext to conceal his ‘wrath’:The Book of Esther centers on the first explicit instance of anti-Semitism in recorded history.
- Rabbi Michael Knopf
Which of the two explanations fits the pattern of antagonism between Judaic minorities and the countries hosting them over the centuries? Another important point: why did Mordecai ‘smuggle’ his cousin/daughter into the king’s bed chamber well in advance of Haman’s evil scheme? Were the Persian Jews already threatened with extermination at this point? To avoid this embarrassing question, a prologue with a prophetic dream was added to the book centuries later (see further below).There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from all people; neither keep they the king’s laws: therefore it is not for the king’s profit to suffer them.
- Esther 3:8
In this post I will try to focus on the canonicity of the Book of Esther, something that has been missing from this thread, but I realize it’s not possible to limit the analysis to mere biblical study. Judaics seem to think that questioning the place of Esther in the Christian canon is in itself an act of anti-Semitism, something only ‘Amalekites’ would do. The Scroll of Esther (3:1) identifies Haman as the descendent of Agag, King of Amalek, but for the rabbis, punishing the ‘Amalek’ is not merely a thing of the distant past. Influential rabbis like Ovadia Yosef, the Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu and Dov Lior of Kiryat Arba have all identified the Arabs in general as ‘Amalek’ (in other words, a nation that must be exterminated), and anybody strongly antagonized by the rabbinate (such as judeophobic Germans), or anybody “obstructing the building of the Third Temple”, may be labeled ‘Amalek’ -- and treated accordingly.
I have no scholarly pretensions, so by trying to discuss the canonicity of an Old Testament book I may be venturing out on thin ice. Thus, I will be content with summarizing and commenting the best-known arguments, aided by a couple of sources. In any case, before I get started, it is important to always keep Old Testament verses clearly separated from Talmudic glosses. The Renaissance-age belief that the Talmud is helpful (or even necessary) in interpreting the Bible is nonsense. There is no good reason why Christians should give their stamp of approval to what second-century Pharisees wrote in the Mishnah about Noah, Moses, Jesus, Haman or anyone else. It is these very same Pharisees Jesus upbraided for falsifying the legacy of Moses, comparing them to vipers, hypocrites and whited sepulchres.
Some have proposed that Mordecai’s killing spree was justified as a ‘purposive action of God’ towards the preservation of the Jewish people who would later be needed to bring forth the Messiah. After all, didn’t Jesus say that “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22)? There are several problems with that reasoning:
- Not all Jews lived under Ahasuerus. The extermination of the Jewish minority in Persia, if such an atrocity had occurred, would have prevented no prophecies or promises from being fulfilled.
- ‘Jew’ is an umbrella term for a quite diversified lot. The ‘Jews’ referred to by Jesus in this particular passage must have been those who had remained faithful to the Mosaic law, that is, the ‘peasantry’ (Am-ha-aretz), not any and all tribes and sects in the land, now referred to as ‘Jews’.
- God uses whom He wills. He of course keeps His promise, but does not ‘need’ the Jewish people; it’s the other way around (and no, God does not study the Talmud in His free time).
- The Judaics, whom the world still misidentifies as the spiritual heirs of the Old Testament Jews, can’t have it both ways. If the Jews were the people chosen by God to bring salvation into the world, they obviously became Christians as a result. Seen in this perspective, Judaics cannot reject Christ AND lay claim to the title of ‘the Chosen People’.
Canonicity
Canonicity means that a text is sanctioned by a cluster of religious authorities (bishops, theologians, saints) in time and space as orthodox and divinely inspired or revealed. It does not necessarily mean the account is historically true or accurate, although this is usually expected. For example, a wisdom tale could in theory become canonical based on its spiritual merits. Canonical or not, the Book of Esther reads more like a pagan fable than a historical account. Even the Wiki admits its fictional character:
Esther’s canonicity has been questioned by both Christians and Judaics over the centuries.The apparent historical difficulties, the internal inconsistencies, the pronounced symmetry of themes and events, the plenitude of quoted dialogue, and the gross exaggeration in the reporting of numbers (involving time, money, and people) all point to Esther as a work of fiction, its vivid characters (except for Ahasuerus/Xerxes) being the product of the author’s creative imagination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Esther
Long before the Council of Jamnia (90 AD) had a chance to deliberate on the matter, the popularity of the Purim festival among Jews had ‘canonized’ Esther. Rabbis Simeon ben Lakish (ca. 300 AD) and Maimonides (ca: 1200 AD) put Esther on the same level as the Law and higher than the Prophets and the rest of Scripture, but there remained a strong tendency, especially in the churches of the West, to view the book with suspicion and to accord it only a deuterocanonical status. St. Athanasius (296-373 AD) did not scrap Esther but removed it from the canon proper in his 39th Festal Letter, and even St. Jerome had qualms about it. Martin Luther considered the Greek additions to Esther apochryphal (which of course they are) and very nearly ripped the whole book out of the Bible.Esther was not admitted to either the Jewish or the Christian canon without some hesitance. The rabbis seem to have been hesitant to canonize a book whose apparently vindictive spirit might be misunderstood by Gentiles, and which instituted a festival for which they found no explicit sanction in the Law. The first objection was overruled by the popularity of Purim among Jews; the second was easily met by ingenious rabbinical exegesis...
- Bernhard W. Anderson, The place of the Book of Esther in the Christian Bible, 1950. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1198590
I am so hostile to the book [II Maccabees] and to Esther that I wish they did not exist at all; for they judaize too much and have much heathen perverseness.
- Martin Luther, Table Talk.
But with the Christian church, which has decisively broken all connections with cultural religion, the Book of Esther continues to present a problem. It has never been very highly regarded, and for many its presence in Scripture has been a stumbling block and an offense.
- Bernhard W. Anderson
It stands further from the spirit of the Old Testament revelation and the Gospel than any other book in the Old Testament.
- Ernst Bertheau.
Here are some of the reasons why scholars have questioned the canonicity of the Book of Esther:Both festival and book are unworthy of a people which is disposed to bring about its national and moral regeneration under prodigious sacrifice.
- Shalom BenChorin
The names of Ahasuerus’ wives are not backed up by historians
According to the Book of Esther, queen Vashti was king Ahasuerus’ first wife. When she refused to come and show her beauty at the king’s command, she was discrowned and made an example of (1:11-22). In the works of Herodotus and Ctesias (who are not exactly trustworthy), the only queen mentioned for that historical period (ca: 485 BC) is Amestris. Some researchers have stretched the imagination and the rules of etymology, equating ‘Vashti’ with ‘Amestris’, or ‘Amestris’ with ‘Esther’. I see no light at the end of the tunnel. The evidence is inconclusive, but should new records ever come to light, I’m inclined to think they will support the Greeks.
Mordecai, Esther and Haman are known only from the Book of Esther
The complete absence of these characters from all other biblical and extra-biblical sources is not proof they never existed, but it carries quite some weight if we consider their prominence and the potential historical impact of a massacre of 75,000 people, assuming it occurred. Much effort has been put into identifying historical ‘Marduks’ and ‘Ishtars’ that would fit the bill, and something tells me the search has not been fruitless for lack of funding.
The text describes improbable events and customs
We are told that, back then, women had to endure 12 months of pampering and cosmetic grooming before the king would see them. This is not credible and no extra-biblical documents describe such a custom. Another infamous yarn is Haman’s erection of a 25-m high gallows in a matter of hours. Wild exaggerations were the rule in Oriental fables and sagas. The Ramayana is a perfect example of this, and even the more recent and much adulated Josephus reported clearly unrealistic figures. Hoffman provides many instances of the rabbinic penchant for spinning tall tales:
The length of Sennacherib’s camp was four hundred Persian miles, the width of the necks of his horses when standing side by side was forty Persian miles, and the number of soldiers in his camp was two-hundred-and-sixty ten thousand thousands, minus one (BT Sanhedrin 95b).
Various official Jewish sources reveal that in the past prominent, highly regarded Jewish leaders have said that 800 million Jews were killed by enemies of the Jews. The Talmud [...] reports that the Roman Emperor Hadrian slaughtered 800,000,000 Jews (Herman Otten, The Christian News Encyclopedia).
That other rabbinic fabrication - the cursed 6,000,000 figure - is still with us, and you can go to prison for questioning it. The claim that 75,000 Persians were massacred may belong in the same category, so it seems a waste of time to argue over the historicity of this point, other than to reiterate the fictional format of the text and the subversive nature of the plot.Eighty thousand trumpeters besieged Bethar where Bar Kozeba was located, who had with him two hundred thousand men [...] He thereupon had two hundred thousand men of each class [...] And what used Bar Kozeba to do? He would catch the missiles from the enemy’s catapults on one of his knees and hurl them back, killing many of the foe....(Midrash Rabbah: Lamentations 2:4)
The Book of Esther is missing from the Dead Sea scrolls and from Melito’s canon
Since the canon of bishop Melito of Sardis (who took pains to check with authorities in the East) also contains a couple of books that are not included in today’s canon, one could argue that the absence of Esther from the list proves nothing. Indeed, this and several other objections to the canonicity of Esther are ‘arguments from silence’. Stephen Curto claims that many such arguments, when taken together, weaken the case against Esther. I don’t agree. As I see it, the greater the number of puzzling ‘silences’, the smaller the odds that “we simply haven’t found the records yet”.Melito’s canon [ca: 170 AD] is the earliest recorded Old Testament canon we have in the Christian tradition. Recorded in Eusebius’ writings, Melito’s canon gives a picture of what some considered to be the Holy Scriptures for the early church fathers, since a New Testament Canon was not yet assembled. Many argue that because Melito lists all of the books we now accept as canonical except for Esther, Esther should not be included in the Canon.
- Stephen Curto, Should She Stay or Should She Go? http://mygiveonthings.com/should-she-st ... of-esther/
The Dead Sea scrolls, the most comprehensive collection of Old Testament manuscripts ever found, prove that the Old Testament has remained virtually unchanged for millennia. Every canonical book of the Old Testament (or fragments thereof) has been identified among the Dead Sea scrolls, except the Book of Esther. The original custody of the scrolls is usually attributed to the Essenes. However, according to Curto, the Essenes were wackos who “did not hold the feast, or the events in Esther that established it, in high regard”:
In the above quote, Curto not only insinuates that the monastic orders of the golden age of Christian civilization were incubators of fundamentalism, but repeats the trite fallacy that the Pharisees and Sadducees were ‘mainstream’ at the time of Christ.The Essenes were, for lack of better phrase, the “religious wackos” of the day. While the Pharisees and Sadducees represented the more mainstream liberal and conservative Jewish equivalents of the first century, the Essenes were similar to the monastic orders of mid Christendom.
- Stephen Curto, Should She Stay or Should She Go? http://mygiveonthings.com/should-she-st ... of-esther/
An analogy could be made between the Pharisees/Am-ha-aretz opposition of two thousand years ago and the modern-day opposition between the minority controlling the mass media (while passing off their peculiar perspective as ‘mainstream’) and the general population (who tend to be more conservative than not). The Pharisees rose to prominence from the second century on by virtue of their rejection of the Messiah and their organized opposition to Christianity, which to their chagrin the bulk of Israelites had willingly transitioned to. Today, rabbis become livid at the mention of ‘replacement theology’, albeit for the wrong reason. I agree the term is inaccurate: Christianity did not replace Old Testament monotheism; it assimilated it in the sense that a greater perspective subsumes a lesser perspective. Call it a ‘qualitative upgrade’, if you will. Phariseeism was eventually recast as ‘Judaism’, which explains why Christianity is in reality older than codified Judaism and why the two systems are by definition incompatible. Pope John Paul II was wrong: Judaics are not the Christians’ elder brothers in the faith (L’Osservatore Romano, 1986).The Pharisees were originally only a sect within Israel. They were not the dominant force. The majority of the Israelites rejected the oral law which is what the Talmud is~the oral tradition of the elders committed to writing after the crucifixion of Christ and the destruction of the Temple. The great mass of Israelites (the Am-ha-aretz) were not Pharisees and were oblivious to the orally transmitted traditions of the elders and were thus regarded as ignoramuses by the Pharisees. The Pharisees did not yet have a hold over the majority of the people of Israel; though the Pharisees did represent a potent underground current of corruption that had existed within Israel since the time of the Golden Calf.
- Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, note on p. 28
The author of Esther is unknown
I don’t see this as a significant problem, but it would certainly help Esther’s case to boast some credible authorship.
The book contains historical inaccuracies
There is no sound extra-biblical evidence for the claim in Esther that the Persian king was unable to annul a law he had himself promulgated. Such an arrangement sounds implausible, unless the text is reinterpreted to mean that the King’s edict could not be physically retrieved once the parchments had been dispatched to the four corners of the empire. However, that smells like a lawyer’s loophole since the day appointed for ‘the killing of the Jews’ (the thirteenth of the month of Adar) was 9 months into the future. Second issue: the number of satrapies (provinces governed by viceroys) given in Esther (n=20) is very different from that reported by Herodotus (n=127). Some have hypothesized that Herodotus referred to smaller administrative units by the same word. Who can say? Third issue: the objection that the Persian king could not take a Jewess for his wife seems irrelevant to me since Esther lied to Ahasuerus about her background (and intentions) until after the second banquet when she asked him “to grant her any request”. Unless one considers the king’s continued acceptance of Esther as his wife after he learned she was crypto-Jewish.
The book contains no mention of God or references to religion
Several pious passages were added by the Greeks to give the story a more scripture-like appearance and justify Mordecai’s Trojan Horse scheme, although some innocent minds believe these extensive changes were a natural process by which “further reflections on the story became part of the story itself”. The additions, the earliest of which date from the late 1st century AD, include an opening prologue describing a prophetic dream had by Mordecai, prayers for God’s intervention offered by Mordecai and Esther, a mention of God’s intervention when Esther appears before the king, and a passage in which Mordecai interprets his dream in terms of the events that followed. Reading Esther with these interpolations is a completely different experience. If they were necessary to sell the story as scripture, something is not right.
The New Testament makes no reference to Esther
Only the Book of Esther and the Song of Solomon are not referred to in the New Testament. This adds to the list of ‘arguments from silence’. As I have said, the sheer number of ‘silences’ makes it more difficult to dismiss this one as a coincidence. Even if the Christian canonization process for the Old Testament was not completed until after the time of the New Testament writings (actually, little is known about that), the book was well known at the time of the Apostles. While there was no obligation to refer to every single Old Testament book in the New Testament, one would expect that if the Jewish victory over the Persians was so providential, paving the way for the advent of the Messiah, as hebraist Wilhelm Vischer claims, it would have made a lot of sense to refer to it.
The book does not refer to Mosaic Law or the return to JerusalemThe elevation of Esther to the position of queen and her victory in behalf of her people are regarded as signs, manifested prematurely in the shadows of world history, of the resurrection of Christ and the ultimate glorious triumph at his Second Coming [...] All victories which the Lord gave the people of the Old Covenant in their history have, according to the Biblical witness, this meaning as signs of the final Victory.
- Anderson on Vischer (Das Christuszeugnis des Alten Testaments, vol 2, 1942)
Just as the book makes no mention of God or religion, it also completely ignores Mosaic Law. In this respect, it is almost as if the Jewish identity had been grafted a posteriori onto a pagan template. As for the missing context of the Jews’ return to Jerusalem, waves of which were occurring at the time of Xerxes, I don’t see that as a significant problem. However, some who are vexed by this ‘silence’ have chosen the easy way out by invoking the ‘purposive action of God’ argument:
Arguments in favor of Esther’s canonicityThe truth is very likely that God kept Esther and Mordecai in Persia specifically so that they could work against Haman’s plan to wipe out the Jews.
- Stephen Curto, Should She Stay or Should She Go? http://mygiveonthings.com/should-she-st ... of-esther/
The fact that most of the Church Fathers, all the way up to the Council of Trent, accepted the Book of Esther as part of the canon carries much weight. On the other hand, since the version they knew had been repackaged by the Greeks (the pious additions were translated by St. Jerome in separate), it raises the question of whether they would have viewed the undoctored pagan original in the same light.
It may also be argued that Esther is part of “the five Megillot” (the other four are the Song of Songs, the Book of Ruth, the Book of Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes) which have been used in Judaic ceremonies probably since the first century. The Jewish Encyclopedia says that “it is doubtful when the custom of reading the roll of Esther publicly was introduced, but it was at all events before the destruction of the Temple” (70 AD). I am not disputing the popularity of Purim/Esther among Jews before Christ, but when you search for a justification of the canonicity of the book, you inevitably end up in the meanders of the Talmud. Our concern here is not with Midrashic fantasies and Talmudic glosses, but whether or not the Book of Esther belongs in the Christian Old Testament canon.
The New Testament makes no mention of potential problems with any Old Testament book. This ‘argument from silence’ has led some people to assume Jesus considered Esther holy scripture.
So references to Esther are conspicuously absent from the New Testament, and that’s just a coincidence, but the fact that Jesus is not on record disapproving specific books or scriptural passages (the oral traditions of the ‘Elders’ do not count as scripture) is evidence that Esther is canonical? Curto goes as far as to say that if Jesus Himself raised no fuss about Esther being in the wrong place, then neither should we. Oh well...If the Hebrew Canon as it stands today is the wrong one, it seems almost impossible that Christ would have let it slip by. The Son of God through whom everything was made, certainly would have ensured that any errors in the texts being used to teach God’s will would be corrected.
- Stephen Curto, Should She Stay or Should She Go? http://mygiveonthings.com/should-she-st ... of-esther/
Another argument adduced in favor of the historicity of Esther is that the writer supposedly had intimate knowledge of the Persian courts. This clashes with the historical inaccuracies mentioned earlier and supports the notion that the original author was more akin to a playwright. Didn’t Shakespeare have a surprisingly detailed (though not perfect) knowledge of Italian court customs although he almost certainly never left England, nor was himself a court official? Curto also argues that some phrases are compatible with historical literature (contradicting the predominant view that Esther is written in the style of a historical novella) and that the inclusion of “pleas to search the historical records” suggests the events in Esther are historically accurate. Three verses in the book allegedly invite the reader to search the historical records:
The last verse is actually a question. Ok, I’m joking. It is not a bad argument ... if only those chronicles had been found.And when inquisition was made of the matter, it was found out; therefore they were both hanged on a tree: and it was written in the book of the chronicles before the king. (2:23)
Then the king said to Haman, Make haste, and take the apparel and the horse, as thou hast said, and do even so to Mordecai the Jew, that sitteth at the king’s gate: let nothing fail of all that thou hast spoken. (6:10)
And all the acts of his power and of his might, and the declaration of the greatness of Mordecai, whereunto the king advanced him, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia? (10:2)
Note on Anderson
The above quotes by Bernhard Anderson may give the impression that he supports the decanonization of Esther, but he actually favors keeping it in the Christian canon. However, as is almost always the case, he does not understand the distinction between Biblical Jews and Talmudic Judaics, repeating the misconception that “Judaism cradled Christianity”. In other words, he conflates the struggle of the Old Testament Hebrews against tyrannical idolaters with the struggle of idolatrous rabbis against the Christian and Islamic nations, seeing in it “the eternal miracle of Jewish survival”. Writing in 1950, this mental confusion could easily have been compounded by war-time propaganda. So, while he correctly points out that...
...he defends preserving Esther for theological reasons:The church should recognize the book for what it is: a witness to the fact that Israel, in pride, either made nationalism a religion in complete indifference to God or presumptuously identified God’s historical purpose with the preservation and glorification of the Jewish people.
Note on Curto[Jesus] came, as he said, not to destroy but to fulfil the Law and the Prophets. Yet, paradoxically, only as he destroyed a community circumscribed by the barrier of the Law, and only as he shattered a messianism which hoped for the preservation and the glorification of the Jewish people, did he bring the promise to its fulfilment. Thus Jesus Christ both unites inseparably and at the sarne time draws the sharpest cleavage between the Old and the New Covenants. ln this theological context the Book of Esther has a significant place in the Christian Bible.
Stephen Curto thinks the Book of Esther definitely belongs in the Christian canon. Those who are interested can read for themselves how he counters each formal objection by clicking on the link in the quotes posted above. He admittedly makes some good observations, and his essay was very useful in putting this post together, but his defense is frankly biased, which is all right. He would probably say I am biased in the opposite direction, but if we go beyond the domain of biblical scholarship and contemplate the greater spiritual picture, and if St. Matthew heard right when Jesus declared that “by their fruits ye shall know them”, the Book of Esther fails the test.
Fruits
What do you do when you find a rotten apple in a basket?
Purim enshrines the role of the hereditary oppressor (in this case “Haman”) as part of a function of keeping Judaic people subservient to Judaism’s religious and political rabbinic overseers. In the arcane Talmudic and Kabbalistic ‘Hester Panim’ psychology of Purim, a certain amount of violent persecution of Judaic people is regarded as desirable for maintaining the loyalty of Judaics to their duplicitous and corrupt leaders. The rabbis believe that without such anti-Judaic violence, Judaic people will wander from the rabbinic fold, marry a shiksa (‘female abomination’, i.e. a gentile woman) or one of the shkotzim (male gentiles of a kind sometimes used for sex by Orthodox Judaic homosexuals), and assimilate gentile ways, all of which are regarded as calamities.
This hidden aspect of Purim can be traced to the Talmudic command to get drunk on Purim. This injunction is an allusion to the revelation of a secret. The Talmud observes that “when wine goes in, secrets come out”. The esoteric Kabbalistic understanding is that the Judaic is to become ‘intoxicated’ on the secret within Purim itself, i.e., the conjunction of opposites, the occult union of Mordechai (the advocate for Judaism) and Haman (the would-be exterminator of Jews). Judaics are commanded to blur the distinctions between the two as a lesson in the arcane truth that both Haman and Mordechai serve the purposes of Judaism.
- Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, p. 825.