Today, I am reading and commenting on Esther 8-10.

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In the past when I read this passage I could not quite wrap my head around why Mordecai’s edict allowed the Jews to completely defeat their enemies.  At first blush when you read Mordecai’s edict and compare it to Haman’s edict it seems like you would end up with a civil war and that the Jews, being a minority, would get the worst of it.  Now one could look at it and see that Mordecai was alive and a rising power in the empire and that the king certainly would favor his queen’s people over their enemies.  So, one can see that any government officials who did not hate the Jews would lean towards their side our of self-interest.  Which brings me to the thing that I noticed today.  Both edicts allowed those who killed their enemies to plunder their goods, but the passage tells us that the Jews did not lay their hands on the plunder.  Well, if the Jews did not gather the plunder to which they were entitled, where did it end up?  A lot of it would have ended up in the hands of government officials, either in their role as a government official to be spent on government projects, or in their personal role as someone who could use their position to take possession of “unclaimed goods.”  In either of those cases, they would be predisposed to favor the Jews.

On another note, many scholars say that the Book of Esther is historical fiction rather than a description of actual events.  I can understand why they would think that when I look at what we know.  I will list a few of the facts which they use to justify their position.  First, we have no archeological evidence for Queen Vashti, or even non-Jewish references to her.  Second the Book of Esther says that Persian had 127 provinces, while ancient historians (such as Herodotus) list it as having between 20 and 36 provinces.  I don’t have a specific answer to these objections, but the first one is what is called an ‘argument of silence.”  Or to put it another way, absence of evidence is not proof of absence.  If we had writings about Queen Vashti it would bolster the historicity of the Book of Esther, but its absence does not in any way undermine it.  As for the number of provinces I look at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.  Both of those read to me as if Judah was sort of a sub-province to province of Trans-Euphrates.  It seems as if officially the governor of Trans-Euphrates had authority over Judah, yet Nehemiah ruled Judah as governor and answered only to the king of Persia.   There may have been many such sub-provinces and the author of the Book of Esther was counting them all as provinces.  My final thought on the historicity of the Book of Esther comes from the fact that I find all of the other suggested origins for the Jewish holiday Purim unsatisfactory.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.