A Literary Approach to the book of Esther/Hadaççah

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[If there is evidence that the literary approach greatly aids one’s understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures, it would be the book of Esther/Hadaççah(Haddasah). This particular discussion first posted in 2013, feels like you’re reading a commentary of a Shakespearean play — plot, characterization, denouement, etc.  In fact, the whole story of Esther begins to sound like a well-constructed piece of fiction. . . which means either that’s what it is, or the authors of the 3rd section of the TNK, Ketuviim or “the Writings” had literary skills enough to craft such a historical narrative as Esther in ways that a modern literary analyst like Jack M. Sasson would bother to scrutinize and critique. You’ll find out what we mean when you read through this commentary from our MUST READ/MUST OWN resource: The Literary Guide to the Bible, eds. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode.  Highlights, images and reformatting ours.—Admin1.]

• It explains to them why such a festival bears the non-Henbrew name Purim and instructs them how to observe it.
• It also seeks to imbue them with pride at the accomplishment of Jewish ancestors who lived in a strange land and faced ruthless foes.

• he frequently adopts the style of an archivist, giving dates for specific activities and providing genealogies for his main characters;
• he flaunts his (imperfect) knowledge of the Achaemenid Empire and its administration, scattering Persian words for which he gives Hebrew equivalents;
• he invents a few of the names he needs, imitating Persian nomenclature;
• he challenges readers to check his facts in the chronicles of past Persian kings—certainly an impossible assignment for the average reader.

• The storyteller makes observations on details in passing, as with the crowning of royal horses at parade time (6:8),
• or he builds a major subplot around them, as with the procedure for securing an audience with the Persian king (4:11).
• In telling how the king finds a replacement for Vashti (2:8-15), the storyteller lingers over stylized elements which are better known in the Arabian Nights: the need for two semesters to prepare a young woman physically for just one night with the king, and the tribulation of a king who must nightly rise to the occasion until he is released from it by the one true love.

This particular scene may not be the teller’s most successful invention, for it is neither crude enough to arouse prurient interest nor focused sharply enough to keep us mindful of Esther’s bounteous charm and appeal. It does, however, remain typical of Jewish romances of the Hellenistic period (such as Judith, Tobit, Susanna, and segments of Daniel) in exaggerating the manners and mores of others, and thus it vividly illustrates why Esther cannot be judged on its distortion of Persian practices.

• It alternates action and description, although the two are rarely allowed to merge.
• The storyteller has in mind an audience who will not grow tired of repetitions, and he adopts a chatty, possibly vernacular, Hebrew.
• Although sometimes lackluster and often prolix, this idiom nevertheless promotes ambiguity by depending on certain verbal forms which lack temporal precision (for example, the infinitive absolute).
• The teller is careful to use a language with a restricted vocabulary only when narrating action.
• However, when lingering on descriptions of specific scenes (such as the banquets or the search for a new queen) he uses a cataloguing style, rich in a vocabulary for luxurious living, often without conjunctions.
• The narrator often masterfully juxtaposes simultaneous activities within the confines of a single verse.
• An excellent example is the brilliant contrasts afforded in 3:15: “As the couriers swiftly fanned out with the king’s resolution and as the decree was proclaimed in Susa’s citadel, the king and Haman settled down to drink while Susa was struck dumb.”

• Occasionally the teller flaunts his omniscience when revelation of a character’s inner thoughts is important to the plot (as at 6:6).
• He is not beyond expecting his audience to suspend plausibility for the sake of a brilliant ending.
• Thus the story requires that Haman know nothing of Esther’s relationship (let alone kinship) to the Jew Mordecai.
• In this ignorance he may be alone: Mordecai, after all, himself paced daily in front of the harem before Esther was chosen, and afterward everyone seems to be transmitting information between the two and among the Jews of Susa (see especially 2:22).
• There are other ambiguities, especially in the dialogues, whose precise import cannot easily be assessed. For example, Mordecai warns Esther that although she may feel safe within the palace, the help which comes to the Jews from “another quarter” could lead to her death and to that of her “father’s household” (4:14). Esther, of course, is an orphan and may well be an only child.

• is a caricature of a king who is swayed by the first advice he hears; but this trait is required by the plot:
  • all the multiple reversals that are featured in the story could not occur easily were the king single-minded in perspective or conviction.
  • On the contrary, the king must be totally open to suggestion.
  • Thus, except when the intoxicated monarch brashly asks for Queen Vashti’s presence at the second banquet honoring the palace personnel (1:10-11), he never acts without some expressly stated or subtly intimated advice.
  • Indeed, the frequency with which advice is offered from all sources and to every character is such a major feature of Esther’s plot structure that is has led some scholars wrongly to locate Esther’s origins in Wisdom circles.
• Ahasuerus is not without his droll moments, and the writer assigns him what may be the story’s most comic line.
  • When Esther denounces the man who has sold her and her people into slavery, the accused, of course, could be the king as well as Haman.
  • Yet the events of barely a fortnight earlier are so hazy in his memory that Ahasuerus can answer: “Who is he and where is he who dares plan such a thing?”

• He is proud of his subordination to a capricious king;Haman so obsessively needs to destroy Mordecai that he departs from his own plan in order to hasten the death of his archenemy. His vanity turns him into a buffoon (6:6); so does his panicked reaction to Esther’s accusation (7:8).
  • yet he is so insecure that he brandishes his vita even before those who must know it well (5:9-12).
• Yet Haman is not one-dimensional. During one brief moment, in fact, he even comes to realize the consequences of his own acts, and in this regard he may well deserve to be termed “antagonist.” This occurs when Haman is told: “If Mordecai, before whom you have begun to fall, is of Jewish stock, you will not overcome him; you will certainly come to ruin in his presence” (6:13).
• Haman, however, is hardly a Persian Shylock, and his fall remains comic, never eliciting audience sympathy.

• A Jewish orphan raised by her cousin Mordecai, she is pretty and winsome; but she responds to what others expect of her.
• She becomes a queen because she lets others make decisions crucial to her future, and she can be browbeaten by Mordecai’s threat even when assured of her husband’s attachment (4:13-14).
• Yet, like many other women in Hebrew Scripture who come into their own after men create crises they cannot resolve themselves, Esther does rise to the occasion, and even after Mordecai has become the king’s main adviser, she finds the means by which to save her people (8:1-6).
• That she returns to Mordecai’s control after her moment of triumph tells us much about the circumscribed range of movement antiquity allowed women.
• The writer’s fondness for Esther is obvious at all stages of the story, and he gives her the most personal voice of any character.
  • Esther can show anxiety about her cousin’s welfare (4:4) as well as elicit pathos at the burden she carries in behalf of her people (4:16).
  • She can be feminine and mysteriously coquettish (5:8), but she can also be ministerial (8:5, 9:13).
  • Her most brilliant lines, however, are delivered at the second banquet, when she flatters, pleads, deplores, then turns sarcastic—the last, admittedly lost on AHasuerus—all within two verses (7:3-4):

• is played like a theme in a Sibelius symphony, with fragments of his personality occurring scattered in the early chapters;
• only after Haman’s fall are they integrated into a full version to represent the writer’s perfect image of a partisan Jew in a position of mastery: “Indeed, Mordecai the Jew ranked just below King Ahasuerus; he was highly regarded by the Jews and was very popular among his brethren, constantly seeking his people’s welfare and interceding in behalf of his kindred” (10:3).
• From the moment he first appears, Mordecai is a courtier, and his battles are with is colleagues at the royal court.
• The writer does not judge Mordecai when he brings his brethren to the brink of disaster either because of rancor (he has just saved the king and felt that he deserved better than to be forgotten) or because of insubordination and misplace pride (it is the king, after all, who determines how to treat Haman).
• The storyteller is deadpan as he reports Mordecai’s quick forsaking of his mourning garb when Haman calls for him with royal attire and chariot (chap. 6).
• Mordecai has come to represent the Jew who will not be bowed by circumstances and who will seize unforeseen opportunity.
• Moreover, the teller, who is certainly familiar with Israel’s history, knows that under no circumstances would a descendant of Saul—in this case Mordecai (2:5)—allow a descendant of Agag—in this case Haman (3:1, 11; 9:24)—once again to escape God’s will and thus avoid extirpation (see 1 Sam. 15).
• Mordecai himself seems aware of the momentous aspect of this confrontation when he berates Esther: “Even if you maintain silence in this situation, relief and liberation will come to the Jews from another source, while you and your family will perish. Who knows, you may well have come to the throne just for this occasion” (4:14).

• Mordecai of the Greek version is a more detached person, more obviously aware of the cosmic struggles in which Jews are mere pawns.
• This version is set a full year before the Hebrew text begins its tale, and precisely ten years before Haman casts lots.
• Mordecai receives a dream full of enigmatic visions. He awakes and cannot resolve them but stumbles upon the plot to kill the king. He is immediately rewarded by the king, for which he earns Haman’s jealosy and hatred.
• The Greek text intimates Haman’s involvement in the plot, and his Agagite descent is made Macedonian (Greek A:1-12).
• Mordecai’s refusal to treat Haman as the king had commanded is given a noble reason in one of the many prayers inserted in the text: “You know, Lord, that it was not because or insolence or arrogance or vanity that I … did not bow down before arrogant Haman … But I did this in order that I might not put the glory of man above the glory of God” (Greek C:5-7).
• When, after many self-conscious prayers (not available to the Hebrew version), Mordecai reaches the pinnacle of power, he can recall his dream and find correlations to the events of the past ten years (Greek F:1-10).
• The reader of the Greek version, therefore, never needs to delve into Israel’s past to appreciate fully the book’s many mysteries; they are all resolved for him by a didactically explicit Mordecai.

• the fate which overtakes Haman is predetermined,
• and in the ensuing triumph of Mordecai the writer gives his audience opportunity to hope for the future of the Jews.
• In the Greek account, the storyteller suppresses all that is comic, delivering his grave lesson in a serious tone; and his stylistic and structural imitation of apocalyptic literature (Daniel and the many apocalypses of the Hellenistic period) serves his purpose perfectly.
• In the Hebrew rendering, however, the comic potential of the story is richly exploited, and laughter at human vanity, gall, and blindness becomes the vehicle by which the writer gives his tale integrity and moral vision.
• Were it not for its modern pejorative connotation, “travesty” (wherein serious subjects are treated lightly) would suit Esther as a literary category.
• Setting aside the questions of intellectual influence or contact, we can say that this is essentially the same literary mode adopted by Hellenistic romances (for example, Apuleius’ Golden Ass) by the medieval fabliaux, and by Voltaire in his satiric Contes philosophiques (such as Candide, Zadig, and Micromegas). In all such stylized, farcical narratives, the laughter is broad and comes from the incongruity of situations and from the sharp reversal of fate.
• In the Hebrew version of Esther, banquets are a key to the tale’s structure.
  • This version opens with two successive banquets (the second also includes Vashti’s own) set in Ahasuerus’ third regnal year (1:3-9), and it ends with two others, set in his twelfth year, wherein the Jews celebrate their victory over their enemies (9:17-18).
  • These parallels bracket the tale, of course, but, more important, they complete a gradual shift of interest from generalities regarding the Persian Empire to particularities of Jewish concern.
  • The lavish descriptions of Ahasuerus’ commemorative banquets are therefore balanced by the reasoned prescriptions for festivities perpetually imposed upon the Jews by Mordecai’s edict (9:20-23) and by Esther’s letter (9:29).

• The Hebrew version exploits a motif that was all too familiar and even realistic to audiences in antiquity:
  • a usurper murders a king and seeks legitimacy by forcibly appropriating the reigning queen.
  • These crucial scenes (chaps. 5-8) change so rapidly and are filled with so much movement that the audience hardly realizes how carefully they are plotted.
  • In fact, some scholars have mistakenly tried to use these chapters to prove that Esther is formed of two separate strands,
    • one focusing on the harem intrigues involving Vashti and Esther,
    • the other on the court struggles involving Mordecai and Haman.
  • In order to appreciate the artistry of these scenes, we should recognize that Haman’s fall requires the conjunction of three separate factors. By itself, Esther’s accusation of personal malice might only have led the king to investigate the matter, as he did earlier in similar circumstances (2:23). The king himself might not have decided instantly to impale Haman if he had not very recently remembered Mordecai’s loyalty. With Harbona’s revelation, right after Haman’s clumsy lurch at the queen, that Haman has prepared a (seventy-five-foot!) stake for Mordecai, the evidence for a conspiracy fully cystalizes in the king’s mind.
  • Moreover, the scene realizes its comic potential through the contrast between two separate points of view:
    • that of the king, who grows increasingly suspicious,
    • and that of Haman, who, even to the last, never knows why the king, let alone Esther, turns against him.

• She denounces Haman;
• the king is angered and rushes out to reflect;
• a terrified Haman turns to Esther for succor;
• the king returns to finds his vizier prostrate on his wife’s couch and suspects the worst.
• When Harbona comes in with the announcement that Haman had planned to kill the very man whom the king recently honored for loyalty, Haman’s fate is sealed.
• As befits the crime, the punishment is severe: the king orders the execution of Haman’s whole family.
• Any audience in antiquity would recognize the annihilation of a whole clan as standard punishment for treason.

• unsubtle villains meet with brutal fates;
• proud partisans are fully vindicated;
• lovely heroines retain the affection of all;
• and stolid, dim-witted monarchs are there to be used by all.