Esther and the Origin of Purim
483 BC to 473 BC, traditional dateTraditional date
The book of Esther tells how a Jewish queen of Persia and her cousin Mordecai turned back a decree to destroy the Jews of the empire. The feast of Purim keeps the memory of that deliverance.
The story is set in the citadel of Susa, under King Ahasuerus, “who reigned from India even to Ethiopia”; he is usually identified with Xerxes I. In his third year the king gave a great banquet and deposed his queen, Vashti, when she refused to appear before his guests (Esther 1:1–4, 10–21). In the seventh year he made Esther queen. She was a Jewish orphan brought up by her cousin Mordecai, and on his advice she had told no one what people she came from (Esther 2:5–10, 16–17).
The king then raised Haman the Agagite above all his officials. Mordecai would not bow to him. Haman resolved to destroy every Jew in the empire, cast lots, called pur, to fix the day, and obtained a royal decree for the thirteenth of the month Adar (Esther 3:1–13).
Mordecai sent word to Esther to plead with the king: “Who knows if you haven’t come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” To approach the king unsummoned was punishable by death. She asked the Jews of Susa to fast for three days and went in (Esther 4:8–16). The king received her. At the second of two banquets she named Haman as the enemy of her people, and he was hanged on the gallows he had built for Mordecai (Esther 5:1–8) (Esther 7).
By the book’s account a royal decree could not be revoked, so a second decree allowed the Jews to defend themselves. On the thirteenth of Adar they killed their enemies, and they rested and feasted on the fourteenth, in Susa on the fifteenth. Mordecai and Esther wrote to the Jews of every province to keep the two days each year with feasting, gifts of food to one another and gifts to the poor. The days were called Purim, after the lot (Esther 8:8–12) (Esther 9:1–2, 16–32).
The Hebrew book never names God. The ancient Greek translation adds prayers of Mordecai and Esther (Septuagint Esther 4:17, with the passages not in the Hebrew), and a note at its end says that Lysimachus, a man of Jerusalem, translated it and that it was delivered in the fourth year of the reign of Ptolemy and Cleopatra (Septuagint Esther 10:3, closing note). Josephus, about AD 93, retells the story and says that Jews throughout the world still kept the days and called them Purim (Josephus, Antiquities 11.292–295).
How this is dated
Traditional date. From later tradition or from internal biblical chronology, with no outside anchor.
The dates are the book’s own. The banquet falls in the third year of Ahasuerus, Esther becomes queen in the seventh, and the decree and its reversal belong to the twelfth (Esther 1:3; 2:16; 3:7). Ahasuerus is the Hebrew form of the Persian name that Greek writers give as Xerxes, and Ezra places him between Darius and Artaxerxes (Ezra 4:5–7). Xerxes I reigned from 486 to 465 BC, which gives 483, 479 and 474–473 BC. The Greek version of Esther and Josephus name the king Artaxerxes (Septuagint Esther 10:3, closing note) (Josephus, Antiquities 11.184).
Whether the story records events is disputed. No Persian or Greek narrative mentions Esther, Mordecai, Haman or the decrees, and Herodotus, the fullest narrative source for the reign, calls the wife of Xerxes Amestris (Herodotus, Histories 9.108–112). Many scholars therefore read the book as a story and not as a record of events: see Michael V. Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther (1991), and Adele Berlin, Esther (JPS Bible Commentary, 2001). Others hold that it rests on real events. They point to its knowledge of the Persian court, to the extent of the empire, which matches Xerxes’s own list of his lands (Xerxes, Daiva Inscription (XPh) §3), and to the gap between the third and seventh years, when Xerxes was away on his Greek campaign: see William H. Shea, “Esther and History”, Andrews University Seminary Studies 14 (1976), pp. 227–246, and Edwin M. Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible (1990).
Outside the book, 2 Maccabees mentions the feast as “the day of Mordecai” (2 Maccabees 15:36).
Primary sources
Scripture
Jewish Antiquities
- Josephus, Antiquities 11.292–295lexundria.com
- Josephus, Antiquities 11.184lexundria.com
Histories
- Herodotus, Histories 9.108–112penelope.uchicago.edu