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    The Esther Scroll: The Author's Tale
    The Esther Scroll: The Author's Tale
    The Esther Scroll: The Author's Tale
    Ebook194 pages2 hours

    The Esther Scroll: The Author's Tale

    By Seymour Epstein

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    Seymour Epstein's The Esther Scroll: The Author’s Tale is a bold thesis and a radically new interpretation of The Book of Esther that contends it was written neither as light comedy, nor as sacred history, nor as a romance, nor as a handbook for Jewish survival in the Diaspora. Rather, it is a satire on Jewish life in the Diaspora. "Epstein’s argument stands all previous readings of Esther on their head” (Hillel Halkin, from the Preface).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMosaic Press
    Release dateMay 3, 2019
    ISBN9781771614658
    The Esther Scroll: The Author's Tale

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      Book preview

      The Esther Scroll - Seymour Epstein

      שבתים"

      PREFACE

      Esther is perhaps the least biblical book in the Bible. Famously, it is the only one that does not mention God even once. None of its characters prays to God or seems even to think of God, although there is no lack of occasions on which they might do so.

      Moreover, the Book of Esther has many elements of burlesque that are at odds with the Bible’s overall earnestness. Its Persian king Ahashverosh is a hapless bumbler. Its villain Haman falls into traps and steps off cliffs like a cartoon character. Everything he plots to do to Mordekhai happens to him instead. He is wicked where Ahashverosh is only vain and fatuous, but he is none too bright himself. Mordekhai and Esther run rings around him.

      Is the Book of Esther simply a comic romp meant to entertain its Jewish readers and make them laugh at their enemies and non-Jewish rulers while feeling good about themselves? This is one way of looking at it. In fact, as Seymour Epstein points out, this is how, despite the book’s canonical status, Jewish tradition has tended to treat it in creating the carnival-like holiday of Purim around it.

      And yet it is difficult to regard Esther as simply a merry farce. It has too much literary merit. In it are some of the most striking and memorable lines in the Bible. When Haman says to Ahashverosh, There is one people who are scattered but set apart among the nations in all the provinces of your kingdom, and their laws are different from all other nations’ and they do not observe the king’s laws, therefore, the king should see no value in tolerating them, he is succinctly stating, for the first time and for all time, the basic tenets of anti-Semitism. When Mordekhai tells Esther, Do not think to yourself that, of all the Jews, you will escape by being in the king’s household, his words still ring as the classic rebuke to the Jew who believes that anti-Semitism is someone else’s problem. When he goes on to say to her, And who knows if you did not attain royalty for just such a time, he reminds us all that there are moments in life to whose test we alone are summoned. These are not lines written by a mere jokester.

      There have been different ways of reconciling the Book of Esther’s seeming levity, and its plot’s reliance on coincidence and comic reversal, with the perception that there is something serious going on in it. Traditional Jewish and Christian exegesis, which have read it as a true account of a historical event, have seen God’s hidden hand in it. Indeed, they have held, this is the point the book is making: God operates in history even though we are unaware that He is doing so. His absence from Esther’s pages underlines His concealed presence there.

      Modern Bible scholarship, on the other hand, has placed Esther in a tradition of ancient Jewish religious romances represented by such works as the apocryphal Books of Tobit and Judith. Written in the last centuries of the pre-Christian era when the biblical canon was closing, these were, in the words of Lawrence Wills in his The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, popular narratives marked by fanciful and idealized setting, adventurous tone, happy endings and important women characters. In them a hero, heroine, or both, overcome enemies and/or adversity by means of their courage, faith, and coolness under pressure and vindicate the ways of virtue. If Esther entered the biblical canon despite its farcical aspects, this was because it is so skillfully composed that it was eventually accepted as the sacred history it was not originally intended to be. There are other books in the Bible, too – the Songs of Songs and Ecclesiastes come immediately to mind – that are there because of their literary power, not because they share biblical concerns or values.

      But Esther can also be read in a more subtle light. One of the most thoughtful attempts to do so has been the Israeli thinker Yoram Hazony’s in his The Dawn: Political Teachings of the Book of Esther. Esther, he writes there, deals first and foremost with the problem of a Jewish politics in exile: How the Jews, deprived of every institution of power, may nevertheless participate in, and in the last resort make use of, the authority of an alien government in ensuring their own vital interest, and in this case their lives.

      If God is absent from the Esther story, Hazony believes, this is because its characters live in a post-biblical age in which God has withdrawn from direct interventions in human life, leaving His Law and human fate in human hands. Though the odds are stacked against them, it is up to Esther and Mordekhai to combat the menace of Haman by playing their cards as cunningly and determinedly as they can -- and this, Hazony seeks to show by a close analysis, is what they do, calling on all they know about human psychology and the mechanisms of power. Though he does not ignore the comedy in the text, Hazony treats it as ancillary. Haman’s comeuppances may be laughable, but they are not happenstantial, nor are they meant to be understood as the manipulations of a hidden God whose agency, at work behind the scenes, we are being asked to recognize. They are the outcome of a duel of wits in which the more resourceful side wins.

      And now we have a radically new interpretation: Seymour Epstein’s The Esther Scroll: The Author’s Tale. The Book of Esther, contends Epstein in a bold thesis, was written neither as light comedy, nor as sacred history, nor as a romance, nor as a handbook for Jewish survival in the Diaspora. Rather, it is a satire on Jewish life in the Diaspora, in which it sees no prospects for survival at all.

      I won’t go into the details of Epstein’s argument: they are laid out cogently in his book and readers will or will not be convinced by them. Suffice it to say that they stand all previous readings of Esther on their head, starting with Esther and Mordekhai themselves. Every interpretation of the book until now, from the rabbis’ to Hazony’s, has taken it for granted that these two characters are meant to merit our admiration. Epstein challenges this. More often than not, he says, the two are held up by the Book of Esther as illustrations of the corroding effect on Jews of exilic life. Far from being an astutely far-sighted champion of his people, Mordekhai is depicted as a shamelessly assimilated Jew who is willing to prostitute a beautiful cousin with a drunken Gentile king to further his own political ambitions. Esther is no better. A full accomplice in Mordekhai’s palace intrigues, she thinks only of herself and does everything she can at first to avoid her Jewish responsibilities.

      Epstein does not deny that, once they grasp the full gravity of their situation, Esther and Mordekhai perform brilliantly to bring about Haman’s downfall. Yet it is precisely in victory, he argues, that they are at their most reprehensible. Given carte blanche by Ahashverosh , they license the Jews of every city….to destroy, to kill, and to wipe out any force of people or province which threatens them, including children and women. The result is a mass slaughter of 75,000 defenseless Persians.

      In our modern age with its humanitarian concerns, Yoram Hazony writes, this massacre has been an embarrassment and a mystery to many of Esther’s readers. Even supposing that only anti-Semites and their families were killed, what need was there for this? he asks rhetorically. What moral teaching could there be in this?

      Hazony’s answer is that, in the context of the Book of Esther, the massacre of the Persians is moral because it is the best of bad alternatives and because any other choice in [Esther and Mordekhai’s] time and place would have been folly. It is a matter of realpolitik in a cruel world. Without decisive action against his enemy, Mordekhai would have guaranteed himself a reputation of hesitancy and mildness – a reputation which would have breathed new life into the anti-Semitism of the empire. Jews must sometimes act ruthlessly against their enemies because justice unbacked by power can never prevail. (With this, it must be said, the rabbis agreed. Those who were to be killed killed their killers, comments the Midrash on the Book of Esther, treating the Jews’ action as a preventive strike.).

      Seymour Epstein’s reading of this bloody episode is radically different. If the Book of Esther is a satire, he maintains, its climax is the slaughter of the Persians, in which Persia’s Jews, as drunk from their triumph as Ahashverosh is from his wine, are portrayed as having lost their moral compass entirely. Rather than backing justice with power, they have forgotten what justice is while internalizing the non-Jewish values of their foes and descending to their level. Although their lives may have been saved, their souls have already been lost long ago, and every detail of this chapter illustrates both the godless nature of the majority culture of this Diaspora and the sad assimilation of the Jews living in this place.

      It is noteworthy that both Epstein’s and Hazony’s readings, as diametrically opposed as they are, attribute to the Book of Esther a kind of proto-Zionism. If Esther, as Hazony holds, preaches an ethos of Jewish power, this can be fully realized only by a restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. If it constitutes an attack, as Epstein maintains, on Jewish assimilation in the Diaspora, the need for such a restoration is once again the conclusion.

      Presumably, Epstein and Hazony would disagree about what a sovereign Jewish state’s policies should be. Is the real argument between them as much about Israel and Zionism as about the Book of Esther? I think so. Have they then failed to read Esther as it needs to be read? I think not. They are readers, not scholars. It is a scholar’s job to keep himself out of a text, a reader’s to read himself into it. Epstein, so you will see as you follow him verse by verse through the text of Esther,

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