eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781771614658 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Mosaic Press |
| Publication date: | 05/03/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 188 |
| File size: | 357 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
RABBINIC RIFACIMENTO
Si non e vero e bene trovato. This Italian adage is cited by S. Talmon in his Vetus Testamentum article "Wisdom in the Book of Esther" to describe the narrative fiction of the Esther scroll. I could, however, just as easily use it to describe the rifacimento of the scholars of the rabbinic period in the Talmud and the Midrash. The adage translates as "It may not be true, but it's a good story." But, of course, it is true to the Sitz im Leben of the rabbinic era.
Given our traditional reading of Esther as a victory of Jews in a specific Diaspora to be celebrated annually on Purim, with the hope that all Diaspora narratives end in "light and gladness, happiness and honour" (8:16), it is critical to an understanding of the original text to see how this later reading came about.
If myth is that form of explanatory narrative which is so powerful in its truth and suasion that it can influence the behaviour of individuals, families, tribes, and nations, rifacimento is the process by which myths develop and alter in tune with changing historical realities. The kind of re-interpretation that was required for this adaptation was both authentic and legitimate for the rabbinic mind. It is for us moderns and post-moderns as well.
While the Constitution of the United States does not change from one Supreme Court ruling to the next, the laws based on the Constitution do. And so the system works.
The rabbis believed in a God who is omniscient, and, therefore, found Genesis 22:12 puzzling.
"And he said: 'Do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to him. For now I know (yadati) that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favoured one, from me.'"
Would an omniscient God now know something He did not know before? The rabbis found it necessary, then, to suggest that the verb be understood as yadata (You, Avraham, know) rather than the original yadati (I, God, know).
In Exodus 34:6-7 we are given a description of God that eventually became popular as His thirteen attributes.
"The Lord passed before him and proclaimed: 'the Lord! The Lord! a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet He does not remit all punishment, but visits the iniquity of parents upon children and children's children, upon the third and fourth generations.'"
When these two verses were inserted into the liturgy to be read in various prayer services, the latter verse was altered to read that God would indeed clear the guilty. And for that radical adaptation, the last several words were eliminated in the prayerbook version of these Torah verses.
Isaiah 45:7 writes of God, "I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil". At the beginning of the morning service the rabbis have us quote Isaiah's verse, but change the ending to "create all". I'm sure Isaiah would have agreed with the inclusive form, but that's not what he wrote.
The entire book of Song of Songs was re-interpreted rabbinically from its original erotic love poetry to a love saga between God and the House of Israel.
In all of these cases, the original text was maintained as is, sacred document that it is, but the rabbis gave themselves full license to edit and re-interpret according to the norms, values, and historical realities of the world they inhabited. Their interpretation of the words in Psalms 24:6 [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (literally, the generation that seeks Him; figuratively, the generation and its interpretations) was that each generation has its own license of exegesis. (Of course, even this is an adaptation of the original text which meant something quite different.) To quote G.H. Cohn at the end of his work on Esther: "The interpretation of the past renews itself in accord with the existential reality of those who study it.".
Perhaps the best example of rabbinic rifacimento is one most apt for an understanding of a biblical book which does not mention God once in all of its ten chapters. When we read Psalm 137 we are witness to the earliest theological reaction to the Babylonian captivity - abandonment by the Divine. When the captors mockingly demand that the captives sing a "song of Zion", the captives betray their feelings of total abandonment by asking how they can sing "God's song" on foreign soil. God is clearly back in Zion, has abandoned them, and will not be with them in Babylon. Indeed, the psalmist goes on to say that the only way to remember God is to remember His home, Jerusalem. Centuries later we find this exchange in BT Megilah 29a:
"Rabbi Simon bar Yochai said: Come and see how beloved are Israel in the sight of God, in that to every place to which they were exiled the Shekhinah went with them. They were exiled to Egypt and the Shekhinah was with them ... They were exiled to Babylon, and the Shekhinah was with them ..."
The god of Psalm 137 was more a local god whose presence did not follow the captives into Babylon, while the god of the rabbis was globally present and must have been in Babylon as He was earlier in Egypt and in all the Diasporas that existed in the rabbinic times.
Given the original force of Psalm 137, it was perfectly normal for the author of Esther to imagine a place where there is no God (not merely no mention of God), but it was just as natural for the rabbis of later generations and a more developed theology to know that God is everywhere.
The rabbis had three functions to perform. 1. They needed to place the Esther story firmly in the biblical canon by linking it to the rest of the Bible. 2. They needed to re-interpret the book into a fairly clear Jewish victory story. (There were some ambiguities which remained and which I will discuss in a separate chapter.) 3. Finally, they needed to transform a Persian Jewish festival as described in chapter nine into a universal Jewish holiday, Purim.
ESTHER AS A BIBLICAL BOOK
In BT Hulin 139b the question is asked: "Where is Esther indicated in the Torah?" The answer is a partial quote from Deuteronomy 31:18, "Yet I will keep my countenance hidden ...". For our purposes, however, it is worth seeing more of the textual content (verses 16-18):
"The Lord said to Moses: You are soon to lie with your fathers. This people will thereupon go astray after the alien gods in their midst, in the land that they are about to enter; they will forsake Me and break My covenant that I made with them. Then My anger will flare up against them, and I will abandon them and hide my countenance from them. They shall be ready prey; and many evils and troubles shall befall them. And they shall say on that day, 'Surely it is because our God is not in our midst that these evils have befallen us.' Yet I will keep My countenance hidden on that day, because of all the evil they have done in turning to other gods."
As noted above, the rabbis were playing on the Hebrew root ?-?-? (s-t-r to hide) and using Esther's new name as a sign that God's face was hidden as threatened in Deuteronomy. Accordingly, she does God's work as hinted at in an earlier authoritative Torah text. Interestingly enough, even though this interpretation places Esther firmly in the canon, the Deuteronomy quotation, in its entirety, also reinforces the author's original intent of portraying a God- forsaken assimilated community of Jews. The Hulin text goes on to place Mordekhai in the Torah as well with a quote from Exodus that sounds vaguely like his pagan name.
In BT Megilah 10b we find an entire list of apt quotes from other books of the Bible interpreted as linked to the opening phrase of Esther, " And it came to pass in the days of Ahashverosh ...". This is another attempt to biblify the story, and it has the effect of further distancing the rabbis' reading of Esther from the original intent of the author. While the author designed these biblical allusions in order to emphasize the values-gap between an alien culture and that of the Bible, the rabbis utilized these same links to stress the sanctity of a text in the biblical mode.
Again in BT Megilah 19b the rabbis give themselves authority to treat the Esther scroll as a sacred text to be read ritually.
... the Holy One, blessed be He, showed Moses ... the innovations which would be introduced by the Scribes; and what are these? The reading of the Megillah."
According to this rabbinic understanding, the ritual reading of the Megilah, which is not a Torah commandment, was already known by Moses. Esther the book and Purim the holiday become Torah-based elements of Jewish life.
ESTHER AS A JEWISH VICTORY IN THE DIASPORA
Mostly, the rabbis transformed a Jewish tragedy of assimilation into a victory by emphasizing the joy of Purim and by stipulating the mitzvot of the holiday. However, it was also necessary to make of Mordekhai and Esther the Jewish heroes that they are not in the original satire. In numerous instances these two highly assimilated Persian citizens are transformed into model Jews of a Diaspora community by rabbinic interpretation and additions to the text.
One of the best examples of this bizarre transformation is a bit of satire in itself. According to one midrashic play on the text, Mordekhai not only adopted his cousin, Esther, he also married her. That severely aggravates the sin of her sleeping with the king and becoming his wife after winning the contest. In BT Megilah 13b we are given a solution to this problem with the claim that Esther went from Ahashverosh's embrace to Mordekhai's embrace with a stop at the mikveh (ritual purifying bath) in between.
Another case in point are the three repetitive references to the fact that the attacking Jews who killed over seventy-five thousand citizens did not take booty (9:10, 15, and 16), even though in 8:11 they were clearly given royal permission to do so. While the rabbis clearly saw this as meritorious and yet another sign of a values-driven community of Jews who deserved their victory, this was not the intent of the author. The rabbis did not (or perhaps, could not) get the joke. A perverted legal system which required this kind of slaughter in order to avert a royal decree is a hyperbolic joke in this piece of the satire, but the Jews' participation in the killing and impaling is an essential part of the critique of Diaspora life. From the author's perspective, the very same act of not plundering is a sad joke on their moral confusion. Conversely, it is a meritorious act in the victory story of the rabbis.
Interestingly enough, modern commentators have also differed regarding the quality of Jewish life in this bizarre kingdom. G.H. Cohn points out in one of his illuminating essays that late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Bible scholars of all faiths were quick to criticize the Jews in the Esther story for their ruthless killing and their godless behaviour. Cohn is just as quick to defend the Jewish behaviour using the usual rabbinic apologetics, but both Cohn and the critics he opposes base themselves on the traditional reading of the text. Some of the scholars Cohn cites were anti-Semitic in their views and wished to make the point that these Jews did not necessarily deserve a victory. Cohn strongly believes they were God-fearing Jews who did deserve their just victory. According to my close reading of the text, the author believed they were the tragic product of total assimilation into an alien culture which was antithetical to biblical values. He has them win their bodies this time around, only to have already lost their souls.
PURIM AS A UNIVERSAL JEWISH HOLIDAY
The establishment of Purim as a universal victory holiday was the third element of the rabbinic adaptation of the Esther story. There is no reference in the text to a celebration beyond the borders of this fantasy kingdom, but the rabbis wished to extend the holiday to all Jews forever.
Ze'ev Weisman in Political Satire in the Bible says it well:
"The linkage of the story of Esther and Mordekhai with a festival notable for its frivolity and almost pagan license, in complete opposition to the other Jewish festivals, was apparently a vital need for the Jewish Diaspora in its grim historical struggle for existence in a world replete with misfortune, in which the miracle and the paradox became almost commonplace. Only this fundamental, existential need for survival in an alien world might explain the fact that a festival and a miracle story of this kind expanded beyond their historical and geographical location in the Persian empire and turned into a hallowed tradition upheld yearly at its appointed time throughout the Jewish dispersion."
The rabbis state their mission clearly in BT Megilah 6b-7a where they use the language of Esther 9:29 to transform the regional Purim of the story into a Jewish holiday for all. Verse twenty-nine's second letter announcing Purim was, for the rabbis, a sign that, "At first they (Mordekhai and Esther) decreed the observance of Purim only in Shushan, but afterwards throughout the world.".
Elias Bickerman's book, Four Strange Books of the Bible, provides some historical background to this festival transformation. He claims that "The triumph of the Hasmoneans made the book of Esther particularly welcome to the Dispersion ..." and that the text "was translated into Greek in Maccabean Jerusalem to make it accessible to the whole Diaspora". Of course, that "translation" added much to the original text which greatly enhanced the rifacimento of Esther into a Jewish victory story. The most glaring additions were the fourth chapter prayers by Mordekhai and Esther to God, as noted above. These added prayers transform both of them into praying Jews, the very opposite of what the author intended to portray in that chapter.
In the essay by Cohn cited above, he compares post-Holocaust commentators with those earlier scholars he criticized, and finds them much more sympathetic to the plight of the Persian Jews and more understanding of their behaviour. This is yet another illustration of rifacimento. Contemporary scholars, like their ancient counterparts in the Talmudic period, will interpret from the reality of their world. The Holocaust, feminist sentiment, and environmental concerns will influence today's scholars, while earlier exegetes had vastly different background themes to read into the texts before them.
And so, we have a tragedy transformed into a victory. We find a wholly pessimistic view of Diaspora life adapted and altered into a negotiation with life outside of Israel and under alien governance; a dialogue that has its sometimes victories. This rifacimento, total and obscuring as it was, had its flaws - leaks, as it were, where the original satire spilled out. There were moments of doubt and ambivalence which the next chapter will illustrate.
RABBINIC AMBIVALENCE
As much as I argue for the rabbinic rifacimento of Esther in the previous chapter, it is equally important to demonstrate the ambivalence of the Talmudic rabbis to the traditional reading of the scroll. While they read the story as a Diaspora victory under God's providence, they were always careful and caring readers of the text. There was sufficient literary craft in the text to make them suspicious of the original intent of the author, and they voiced those concerns in the give and take of Talmudic discourse.
In BT Megilah 7a Rav Yehuda states in the name of Shmuel that Esther "does not make the hands unclean". Strangely, making the hands unclean is Talmudic code for a book that is sacred and part of the biblical canon. This challenge to Esther's canonicity is met and thwarted by the statement that the book was written under the influence of the holy spirit ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), as with the other books of the third section of the Hebrew Bible, Writings. It must be noted, however, that the question itself raises doubts about the sacred provenance of the book among certain rabbis.
In the traditional reading of the text as a victory story, Mordekhai and Esther are portrayed as heroic saviours of the Jewish community, and the community is understood to be worth saving. Despite the rabbinic accord with that scenario, in several instances the Talmudic masters demonstrate their doubts about the Jews of Persia and Media including the two heroes of the tale.
In the midrash noted in the previous chapter (BT Megilah 13a-b), the Talmud offers the theory that Mordekhai actually married Esther. In this case, handing over his wife to the royal contest would clearly be in violation of both the law of the land and Jewish law. Not being a virgin would disqualify her for the competition, and as his wife, Esther should not be offered to another man (in this case, a non-Jewish king.). Notwithstanding the strange solution to this problem on 13b (see the previous chapter), this reading portrays Mordekhai as neither an obedient Persian, nor an observant Jew.
On the same page of Talmud, Rabbah tells us that Mordekhai's exile to Persia was not forced, but rather of his own will ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). This speaks of a Jew who willingly lives in a godless state, and jibes well with both the original story and the Diaspora that the rabbis recognized as all too real, and which the author feared.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Esther Scroll"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Seymour Epstein.
Excerpted by permission of Mosaic Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
Historicity,
Text vs. Story,
Rabbinic Rifacimento,
i. Esther as a Biblical Book,
ii. Esther as a Jewish Victory in the Diaspora,
iii. Purim as a Universal Jewish Holiday,
Rabbinic Ambivalence,
The Missing God,
Reversal,
Purim as Further Illustration,
B. Text and Commentary,
Commentary, including the Masoretic Text in Hebrew and the,
author's English translation,
i. Chapter One,
ii. Chapter Two,
iii. Chapter Three,
iv. Chapter Four,
v. Chapter Five,
vi. Chapter Six,
vii. Chapter Seven,
viii. Chapter Eight,
ix. Chapter Nine,
x. Chapter Ten,
C. Summary,
D. Bibliography,
E. Excursus,