book of esther is both better and worse than ezra-nehemiah. better because it works better as a fun drinking story with a melodrama but worse because it is so evidently the pattern of every pogrom fuelled by fantasy and paranoia and the slightest hint of a point in history.
it seems very significant to me that the name and works of god are absent, at least explicitly, from this Platonic form of a pogrom narrative. significant for both sides, mind.
I think Luther was right to be confused how it got in the canon
[At this point, my interlocutor mentioned an Orthodox Jewish friend of theirs who did not like Esther because it was “fuelling the persecution complex”]
i don’t think “fuelling” is a strong enough word.
up until Esther in the historical narrative, every genocide against the Jews has made sense – the Israelites are acting like, well, Israelis. They conquered the land fair and square and are facing a long insurgency against the former occupiers of the land, not always successfully. This is fine warrior aristocracy stuff. Even the racist stuff about periodically taking and then putting away wives of subject races makes sense in a heathen sort of way. Even Exodus makes a mythic sort of sense – Israel have stolen themselves from Pharaoh and of course Pharaoh wants to recapture his slaves, and his heart has been hardened into a diamond so he is capable of anything.
But Esther is a departure. This is the prototype of a pogrom – two Mossad agents, a honeypot wife taking advantage of a spurned queen who was too proud to be a whore, and a conveniently located conspiracy-discoverer simultaneously and craftily ingratiate themselves as Court Jews. Mordecai and Esther come up with this themselves. God doesn’t tell them. No prophet tells them. They improvise this plot as they go along. The Court Jew makes nemies of the other courtiers through his aloofness, and one of them is paranoid and racist enough to take the discourtesy as a reason to… kill all the Jews in the Empire, which is to say the world. Unlike every other genocide hitherto there is nothing religious about this. This is a story of pure and nonsensical racism. The Jews in Esther have nothing to recommend them – no covenant, no divine authority, no prophet, all they have are these Mossad agents, and it’s only because it is a Jewish story that we can be sure they are the good guys. And because the bad guy’s motives are so incomprehensible.
Events eventuate, and the Jews survive, hooray.
But what is especially bad about it is that this is a fantasy in which genocide is Good For The Jews. The chain of events that the Achaemenid Mossad set up did not lead to any Jews being killed at all (very implausibly the pogrom is supposed to happen all on one day, which tells us if we have been so blind to notice that the genre we are in is a “day of the rope” type fantasy), but did end up with the enemies of the Jews being killed, and the Mossad-installed courtiers being given high office. That’s a risky wager, to put the existence of your whole people against a strategem like that!
it is a little uncanny, how well the narrative in Esther has programmed people throughout history into taking the roles of the story – though taking entheogens and telling the story every year will do that.
Uncanny because it also seems to have worked on the people playing the role of Haman – though it would have to for it to work. If anyone was ever Haman, then it has to be Hitler, and if anyone were ever the Sons of Haman it would be the Nazi officers! Hitler-Haman acted exactly as someone possessed by Haman would act – senseless overreaction.
What’s even worse is that, okay six million sons and daughters of Israel died in the Holocaust, but it also led to the foundation of the State of Israel, abounding in Mordecais lifted from mean estates in shtetls throughout Europe up to high office in Israel. And these Mordecais have the highest grace and favour of the Empire that rules the world. But at what cost when the fantasy comes real???