The Rest of the Megillah

by Howard Richman

Each Purim, Jews from around the world gather to read the Megillah (the Book of Esther), a practice that has continued for over 2400 years. Although the Megillah is artistically complete, it is not historically complete. Here is the rest of the story….



The above timeline (click on it to enlarge) is the standard Persian history timeline on the bottom with the Jewish timeline on the top. There are a couple of double-lines between kings in the Persian timeline. They indicate a quick succession of kings during a Persian power struggle. I have put a dashed line between Ahasuerus (called “Xerxes” by the Greeks) and Artaxerxes because I hold that Ahasueras and Artaxerxes were actually the same person.

The Jewish dates are specified in Jewish writing as being during a particular year of the reign of a particular king. As a result, the Persian chronology determines the Jewish dates. This timeline gives the following dates for events in Jewish history:

• In 597 B.C.E. King Nebuchadnezzer of Babylon conquered Jerusalem, taking many Jews, including Mordecai’s ancestors, to Babylon.
  
• In 586 B.C.E. Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple.
  
• In 540 B.C.E. King Cyrus II of Persia conquered Babylon. Two years later, he issued a proclamation allowing the Jews to return home. Not all of them did.
  
• In 518 B.C.E., during the anarchy of a Persian power struggle, the Jews of Judah declared their independence. Many other conquered peoples rebelled at about the same time.
  
• In 516 B.C.E. the Second Temple was dedicated, exactly 70 years after the First Temple had been destroyed.
  
• In 480 B.C.E. Esther arrived in the harem in Shushan.
  
• In 474 B.C.E. the two purim occurred. Haman tried to kill the Jews but lost his own life instead.
  
• In 458 B.C.E. Ezra made aliyah (i.e., moved to Judah) with instructions from King Ahasuerus to teach the Jewish law.
  
• In 445 B.C.E. Nehemiah moved to Judah and rebuilt Jerusalem’s walls. Ezra read the entire Torah aloud to the Jewish people for the first time.
  
• In 410 B.C.E. Jews in Egypt experienced what may have been the world’s first anti-Jewish pogrom.

That’s just the basic outline. We also know more about the lives of some of the historical figures that are featured in the Megillah.

Ahasuerus

According to a minority theory, Ahasuerus (Xerxes) and Artaxerxes are the same person. Ahasuerus definitely had a strong motive for the name change. The Greek name for Ahasuerus (“Xerxes”) had become synonymous with “evil” among the Greeks. He was being advised by Themistocles, the ostracized Athenian general who had just emigrated to Persia, and he wanted to play one Greek city state off against another during the Peloponnesian Wars.

Very little Persian writing has survived, so the best accounts of Persian history come from Greek and Jewish sources. Greek history has wildly divergent accounts of the inside story of Ahasuerus and Artaxerxes reigns from historians Ctesias and Herodutus, perhaps due to an intentional propaganda campaign orchestrated by Themistocles. However, there are four major pieces of historical evidence for this name change. Lars Wilson makes the first two points below in his writing on the Internet. I have added the last two:

1. The Greek nickname for Artaxerxes was Longimanus because of his long right hand. But Ahasuerus also had a very long right hand as illustrated by stone carvings at Persepolis showing him, as the heir apparent, standing behind King Darius I. (The two photographs below are from the University of Chicago’s website; click on them to see the originals.)
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. The burial place for the Persian kings at Persepolis has Artaxerxes in a large tomb between the large tombs of Darius I and Darius II. There is no tomb in-between for Ahasuerus.
   
   
3. According to Plutarch, there was a good King Artaxerxes who lived until the age of 94 and reigned 62 years, the precise length of the combined reigns of King Ahasuerus and King Artaxerxes.
   
   
4. Jewish legend holds that a King Darius was Ahasuerus’ son and Persian history holds that King Darius II was Artaxerxes’ son. They are both correct if Ahasuerus and Artaxerxes are the same person.

By the way, the Megillah mentions that sometime after killing his first wife Vashti, King Ahasuerus thought of her and was sad (2:1). History gives us an additional reason for King Ahasuerus’ sadness. He had just returned home after losing the Battle of Salamis to Athenian General Themistocles (the same Themistocles who later emigrated to Persia). When his advisors suggested a contest to pick a replacement for Vashti (2:2-4), he definitely needed some cheering up!

Mordecai

Mordecai was probably named after Marduk, the god of Babylon, the city where his ancestor was exiled. In the Megillah, Esther is reported to have the Jewish name Hadassah (2:7), but we only learn Mordecai’s Babylonian name. He was a well respected assimilated Jew who lived in “Shushan HaBirah” the Persian capital, which was just across the river from the city of Shushan, where a Jewish community lived. (Shushan is more commonly known as “Susa.”)

His name is mentioned in a clay tablet that was preserved at Persepolis. That tablet is one of many listing the accounts of the kings of Persia. It calls him “the sipur Marduka.” A sipur is a scribe or accountant. There is no date on the tablet, but other persons mentioned on the tablet allow it to be dated to the time period that coincides with the last years of King Darius I or the early years of King Ahasuerus.

As reported in the Megillah, Mordecai wrote the text of the second of the two purim (King Ahasuerus’ edicts), the one that gave the Jews the right to defend themselves if attacked and to take revenge against their attackers (8:11). The Jews may have been exercising this right thirty years later when they took up swords, lances and bows while building the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah (4:7).

After the two purim, the Megillah reports that Mordecai was elevated to a position of importance in King Ahasuerus’ palace (9:4). King Ahasuerus knew that the Jews could be trusted, a not insignificant thing in Shushan where assassination of kings was quite common. Mordecai probably brought fellow Jews into the palace, perhaps including Nehemiah as cupbearer, whose job description would have included making sure that the king would not be poisoned.

Mordecai recorded the events of the Megillah and instituted the holiday of Purim so that Jews would always remember them (9:20). Afterwards, he moved to Judah (Ezra 2:1; Nehemiah 7:7).

Haman

Just as the neighbors surrounding Israel today are sometimes her worst enemies, the provinces surrounding Judah were the Jews’ worst enemies during the Second Temple period. The leaders of those provinces had been corrupting officials in the royal court for years, trying to get the central government to act against the Jews. Ezra wrote, “They bribed ministers in order to thwart their plans [to build the Second Temple] all the years of King Cyrus of Persia until the reign of King Darius of Persia” (4:5)

Ezra continued, “And in the reign of Ahasuerus, at the start of his reign [486 B.C.E.], they drew up an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem” (4:6). Haman might have been repeating this accusation when he told King Ahasuerus in 474 B.C.E., as quoted in the Megillah:

There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of your other people and who do not obey the king’s laws; and it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate them. If it please Your Majesty, let an edict be drawn for their destruction, and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver to the stewards for deposit in the royal treasury. (3:8-9)

Haman had a multiplicity of motives for wanting to destroy the Jews. The Megillah tells us that he was mad that Mordecai had not bowed down to him (3:5). It also tells us that he was an Agagite (3:4), and thus descended from the Amalekites with whom the Jews had been having a bitter feud (see I Samuel 15:1-9).

Haman was promising a large sum of money to the king for permission to destroy the Jews, perhaps money that would be provided by the leaders of the provinces surrounding Judah. If so, then Haman was the most famous anti-Semitic lobbyist in Jewish history!

There is no mention of Haman in Persian history, perhaps because his power rose and fell so quickly. After all, he didn’t survive the events related in the Megillah.

Esther

Sixteen years after the two purim, Esther may have been involved when King Ahasuerus sent Ezra to Jerusalem with the job of teaching the Jewish law, as related in the Book of Ezra (7:25-26).

Twenty-nine years after the two purim, Esther was with King Ahasuerus when Nehemiah, the Jew who might have been picked by Mordecai to be the king’s cupbearer, asked for a commission to go to Jerusalem and rebuild the walls. Nehemiah noted that, when he made his request, “the consort” (הַשֵּׁגַל) was sitting by King Ahasuerus. This Hebrew word is sometimes mistranslated as “the queen” since the word “the” indicates that it applies to a known person. But it does not have anything to do with queenship. It has to do with sex. It is much closer in meaning to “the mistress” than to “the queen.” For Jews, there could only have been one known mistress to the king, Esther. Here’s that passage from the Book of Nehemiah:

The king said to me, “What is your request?” With a prayer to the God of heaven I answered the king, “If it please the king, and if your servant has found favor with you, please send me to Judah, to the city of my ancestors’ graves, to rebuild it.” With the consort seated at his side, the king said to me, “How long will you be gone and when will you return?” (2:4-6)

We know, from Esther’s hesitancy in making a request during the Megillah (4:11), that a refusal of a request could result in the requester’s death. That is probably why Nehemiah made the request while Esther was present. It is likely that King Ahasuerus granted Nehemiah’s request as a favor to Esther.

Nehemiah reports that he went to Jerusalem with Persian cavalry escorting him (2:9). Once there, he became Governor and organized the rebuilding and defense of the walls. He also backed up Ezra, who had compiled the Torah and was ready to read it aloud to the people (8:1-12). Ever since, the Torah has been at the center of Jewish religious life.

Fifty years after the two purim, King Ahasuerus died. King Xerxes II took the throne, but within months King Darius II, Esther’s son, overthrew him. Persian history holds that Darius’ mother was a Babylonian concubine named Kosmartydene. Jewish legend holds that his mother was a Babylonian-Jewish concubine, known as
Esther.

During Esther’s son’s reign, the Jewish community in the Elephantine of Egypt were the victims of a pogrom which we know about from the archaeological finds known as the Elephantine papyri. Here is Harry M. Orlinsky’s summary (from his book Understanding the Bible through History and Archaeology) of the event and its consequences:

On several occasions the Egyptians revolted against their Persian conquerors. In one of those uprisings, during the reign of Darius II (about 410 B.C.E.), a mob incited by the local priests and merchants attacked and looted the Jewish temple in the first anti-Jewish pogrom on record. The motivation behind this directed outburst of violence–which the Persian authorities quickly suppressed and punished–appears to have been a combination of two related factors. First, the Egyptian upper classes sought to divert the social discontent among the general population against an alien religious group which could be identified with Persian imperialism. Second, the Egyptian priests and merchants hoped to exploit the general social discontent to weaken and, if possible, to destroy their economic rivals in the Jewish community. (p. 232)

I have boldfaced a phrase from the above quote to show that the Persian authorities quickly backed the Jews of Elephantine. As is clear from King Ahasuerus’ support of Ezra and Nehemiah and from King Darius II’s support of the Elephantine Jewish community, the Jews had powerful friends in Esther’s husband and son. The Jews were so favorably disposed to the Persians that, at some point, they carved a scene from Shushan on a Second Temple gate that became known as the Shushan Gate.

How My Account Compares with Jewish Tradition

Jewish tradition holds that Esther’s son was especially friendly with Nehemiah. Here’s the traditional Jewish account, as related by Attorney Evan Aidman, a member of Philadelphia Orthodox Jewish Congregation Beth Hamedrosh:

Nechemyah [Nehemiah] was a powerful leader and influential adviser in the Persian government. He advised Darius, King of Persia, who Jewish tradition identifies as the son of Ahasuerus through Esther, which makes Darius, halachically Jewish. Nechemyah received from the king the right of police power and the right to bring weapons and contingents of armed men with him when he arrived in Jerusalem. He and Ezra planned the program that would provide physical security to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, lay the basis for a primarily agrarian economy and address the deteriorating spiritual and moral climate of the society.

Nehemiah may indeed have been an advisor to Esther’s son. While Darius was growing up, Nehemiah would have been the cupbearer in the palace. Nehemiah reports returning to Shushan just 6 years before Artaxerxes died (13:6), when the king would have been about 88 years-old. Esther’s son would have been anticipating the power struggle that would occur after his father’s death.

However, I differ from Jewish tradition regarding which King Darius, Darius I or Darius II, was king when the Second Temple was built. Jewish tradition holds that the Second Temple was built during the reign of Esther’s son. But the second Temple was actually built during Darius I’s reign, exactly 70 years after the First Temple was destroyed. Esther’s son did not reign until 163 years after the First Temple was destroyed. The Second Temple had already been built when King Artaxerxes sent Ezra to Jerusalem (7:1-6; 8:33).

I have described Esther’s husband as being especially friendly to the Jews, which appears to disagree with part of Ezra’s account. But, Ezra was actually talking about two different King Artaxerxes. The first of Ezra’s Artaxerxes reigned in between King Cyrus and King Darius I, so he was probably the king known to the Greeks as King Cambyses II. Ezra wrote, “At that time, work on the House of God in Jerusalem stopped and remained in abeyance until the second year of the reign of King Darius of Persia” (4:24). The second King Artaxerxes, Esther’s husband, was much more friendly to the Jews. Ezra wrote, “So the elders of the Jews … brought the building [of the Temple] to completion under the aegis of the God of Israel and by the order of Cyrus and Darius and King Artaxerxes of Persia” (6:14).

My account is consistent with the accounts of Jewish and Persian history in the Megillah and in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. It is also fairly consistent with Jewish tradition, except that I hold that an earlier King Darius, not Esther’s son, was king of Persia at the time the Second Temple was built.

Parallels with Today

There are many parallels between the return of Jews to Judah during Persian times and the return of Jews to Israel today:

• King Cyrus II was the Second Temple’s equivalent of British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour. In 538 B.C.E., just after conquering Babylon, Cyrus issued a proclamation that the Jews could return to Judah. In 1917, when the British were defeating Turkey, Balfour issued a proclamation that the Jews could return to Israel. Both proclamations were designed to enlist Jewish support during times of great power conflict.
  
  
• The leaders of the provinces surrounding Judah in Persian times were the equivalent of the leaders of the countries surrounding Israel today in that they tried to keep the Jewish homeland from growing in strength.
  
  
• Mordecai was the Second Temple’s Theodore Herzl. He was a well-respected assimilated Jew who realized that Jews could not be safe unless they could defend themselves.
  
  
• Nehemiah was the Second Temple’s Ben Gurion. He governed the Jews, guided their self defense, and laid the basis for a strong state.

There are no single individuals of today who correspond to Ezra and Esther. Instead, there are thousands! Ezra revitalized Jewish religious life with the Torah. Esther turned the most powerful empire in the world into an ally. Everyone who works for Jewish religious understanding or who makes friends for the Jewish people is continuing their work.

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Note: This is the text of the talk that Howard Richman gave during the lunch and learn after the annual Megillah reading at Rodef Shalom, Pittsburgh, on the 14th of Adar 5769 (March 10, 2009). Copyright 2009 by Howard Richman. Call 724-783-6512 or e-mail howard@idealtaxes.com for permission to reprint.

Dear Readers,

Thank you for reading this blog. Now that the election is over, I am suspending posting until such time as Governor Huckabee again runs for national office. I originally planned to suspend this blog if Huckabee was not chosen for VP, but decided to keep it open when Palin was chosen. If you want to continue to follow my posts about the economy, I suggest you read the blog that I share with my father and son:

http://tradeandtaxes.blogspot.com

Howard

Bad news and good news

The bad news is that Governor Palin was defeated. She is the rare person who is in politics for all the right reasons. She has succeeded at everything she has tried because she understands how the world works. She is a good person and is grounded in common sense. She would have been an excellent VP, and her election as VP would have made her the next Republican candidate for President.

The good news is that Senator McCain was defeated. Although McCain is a man of principles, he lacks common sense. In the name of "free trade," he would have let the mercantilist governments steal our remaining industries. His policies would have continued the Bush economic decline and would have destroyed the Republican Party's electoral chances for at least a decade.

Not only that, but his cap-and-trade plan on carbon emissions was foolish and unnecessary. He would have put the Republican-imprimatur upon a plan that would have severely damaged American competitiveness. Instead of the Democrats taking responsibility for this destructive idea, the responsibility would have been shared. Scientists have been coming to realize that global warming is caused by factors outside of our planet, chiefly cosmic rays and sun spots. In fact, the planet has been cooling for about a decade because of low sunspot activity.

If President Obama enacts Warren Buffett's Import Certificates plan, then he will turn out to be one of the greatest economic presidents in American history. The United States would immediately come out of the global recession. He would have the freedom to tinker at will with his redistributionist ideas, without harming the American economy and he would definitely be elected for two terms.

If not, then his economic plans are doomed to failure. His policies will produce inflation, economic stagnation, continuing loss of industry, and eventually a dollar collapse that will destroy the Democratic Party's electoral chances for at least a decade. Jimmy Carter's stagflation will look good in comparison. The Republicans will have a chance to come up with a candidate for President in 2012 who has common sense, perhaps Governor Huckabee or Governor Palin.

Howard

America poised to elect a dishonest president

The above photo shows Obama giving the finger at the same time as he says nice words about the good fight that McCain put on in the campaign. When he beat Hillary in the primaries he gave her the finger while giving a similar speech about her.

Howard

I'm voting for Palin

The United States is like a frog sitting in hot water with the heat turned up under it by the mercantilist nations, who are quite willing to lend us money in return for our industries. We are borrowing away our future, heading straight toward a dollar collapse and a temporary period of poverty. Yet Washington still has not identified the problem.

All three Senators who are running for national office were among the corrupt or stupid senators who voted to give away $700 billion of taxpayer money to the bank and securities industry. This money, mostly borrowed from China, will be paid for in interest and manufacturing jobs. Wiser or less corruptible Senators, including Byron Dorgan and Elizabeth Dole, were not taken in by the phony propaganda that the U.S. was in the middle of a liquidity crisis.

Of all of the candidates who are running for national office, only Sarah Palin understood that it is time for the United States to start saving, instead of borrowing away our future. In the VP debate, she said:

[L]et's commit ourselves, just everyday American people, Joe Six Pack, hockey moms across the nation; I think we need to band together and say, "never again." Never will we be exploited and taken advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us these dollars. We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings and we need also to not get ourselves in debt. Let's do what our parents told us before we probably even got that first credit card. Don't live outside of our means. We need to make sure that as individuals we're taking personal responsibility through all of this. It's not the American people's fault that the economy is hurting like it is, but we have an opportunity to learn a heck of a lot of good lessons through this, and say never again will we be taken advantage of.

Like Governor Huckabee, Governor Palin embodies the goodness and common sense of America, while at the same time being a strong supporter of Israel. She could become the next Theodore Roosevelt or Harry Truman.

I wish that I could vote for Governor Palin without voting for Senator McCain. But, since that is impossible, I am voting for Palin and McCain.

Howard

Krauthammer endorses McCain

In his last two columns conservative (and Jewish) columnist Charles Krauthammer has endorsed McCain for President. Here is some of what he wrote in Part I which dealt with foreign policy:

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

There's just no comparison. Obama's own running mate warned this week that Obama's youth and inexperience will invite a crisis -- indeed a crisis "generated" precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he's been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

And here is some of what he wrote about Obama's plans in Part II about domestic policy:

Obama, on the other hand, talks less and less about bipartisanship, his calling card during his earlier messianic stage. He does not need to. If he wins, he will have large Democratic majorities in both houses. And unlike Clinton in 1992, Obama is no centrist.

What will you get?

(1) Card check, meaning the abolition of the secret ballot in the certification of unions in the workplace. Large men will come to your house at night and ask you to sign a card supporting a union. You will sign.

(2) The so-called Fairness Doctrine -- a project of Nancy Pelosi and leading Democratic senators -- a Hugo Chávez-style travesty designed to abolish conservative talk radio.

(3) Judges who go beyond even the constitutional creativity we expect from Democratic appointees. Judges chosen according to Obama's publicly declared criterion: "empathy" for the "poor or African American or gay or disabled or old" -- in a legal system historically predicated on the idea of justice entirely blind to one's station in life.

(4) An unprecedented expansion of government power. Yes, I know. It has already happened. A conservative government has already partially nationalized the mortgage industry, the insurance industry and nine of the largest U.S. banks.

Howard

Federal Reserve currency swaps are exactly the right thing

While U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson's response to the financial crisis has been corrupt and foolish, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke's response has been stellar. His latest measure, currency swaps, is exactly what the doctor ordered.

The currency swaps that the Fed initiated on October 30 are brilliant! They have the same effects as the strategy that I recommended on August 25 at 8:43am on Brad Setser's blog. I recommended that the Fed create dollars, use those dollars to buy foreign currencies and then lend the foreign currencies to the foreign Central Banks.

The Fed came up with something even better. They created dollars and then used the dollars to obtain foreign currencies by trading the dollars with foreign central banks for their currencies.

Here’s how a currency swap works. The Federal Reserve and the foreign central bank each create their own government’s bonds. Then they trade bonds of equal value with each other. This strategy has three extremely beneficial effects:

1. It stabilizes currency markets. Foreign central banks get dollar reserves that will get sold right away, boosting their collapsing currencies versus the dollar.

2.It increases the money supply. In order to engage in these swaps both the Federal Reserve and the foreign central banks create new money, thus alleviating the world's deflation. (Right now, the main problem in the world is deflation, as indicated by falling prices of stocks, oil, and precious metals.)

3. It weakens the dollar The immediate effect of the currency swaps is to weaken the dollar versus these other currencies, which helps the competitiveness of American products in world markets.

For example, the currency swap with South Korea: (1) pulled the won out of its collapse, (2) restored liquidity to Korean banks, and (3) strenthened the won, preventing South Korean automobiles from way-underselling American-produced automobiles in world markets.

I would like to think that the Federal Reserve came up with the idea after reading my comments on Setser's blog, but they were probably just thinking along the same lines that I was.

Now, if Congress would just implement our overall solution, the United States would be immediately prosperous, no matter what happened to the world economy.

Howard