Purim- History, Halacha, and Hotness

As rulers, the Persians adopted a rather laissez-faire attitude toward their subject peoples. Their sprawling empire--stretching from Egypt and Turkey eastward to the borders of India---preserved the basic administrative frame-work set up by the Babylonians, and life went on pretty much as before. By the testimony of the book of Ecclesiastes, it was a government bureaucracy in which bribing judges and corrupt officials was the order of the day: "Don't be surprised when you see it,' Kohelet says of the perversion of justice, "for one money-taker watches over another, with the higher-ups over them" (Eccles. 5:7).

As far as the people of Yehud were concerned, the central Persian government was powerful but distant...

We know of no Persian queen named Esther, or any Jewish queen of Persia. and we would not expect there to have been one. Queens came from the noble Persian families, not from ethnic minorities. Moreover, real kings don't choose queens from beauty contests. In fact, Esther enters the story more like a concubine, and only later emerges as a dignified queen. In contrast, Vashti, who was presumably a queen of proper ancestry and clearly in a high position at court, is treated like a concubine by Ahasuerus.

While Ahasucrus has been equated with Xerxes, no Persian king acted or would act the way Ahasuerus did. He is a king who cannot make the smallest decision without legal consultation, and leaves the big decisions to others altogether. Any resemblance to a real Persian king is purely coincidental.

To govern a country in which a law could never be changed would make governing impossible. A decree toannihilate the Jews is least at home in ancient Persia, an empire that is thought to have been relatively benevolent to the various ethnic groups within it, and is portrayed positively elsewhere in the Bible. This is the empire that permitted the Jews to return to Judah and rebuild the Temple, of which there is not a word in Esther. The plot hangs on at least one particular hook that goes against all logic but which is crucial to the story: that Esther could keep her Jewish identity hidden while all the world knew that she was related to Mordecai and all the world knew that Mordecai was a Jew.

In contrast, those who defend the book's historicity point to the authentic information about the Persian court and its many customs and institutions, and the use of a number of Persian terms But it is not simply a matter of weighing one side's proofs against the other side's, for, when we look carefully at the points for and against historicity, it turns out that the historically authentic material is in the background and setting, while the main characters and the important elements in the plot are much farther removed from reality. If this were a modern work, we would call it a historical novel, or historical fiction. … The distinction between history and story, which is such an important issue for us, would not have engaged readers in the Persian period in the same way it does us. To the ancient reader, an imaginative story was just as worthy, or even as holy, as a historically accurate one, so to declare Esther to be imaginative does not in any way detract from its value. The message of the Book of Esther and the significance of Purim remain the same whether or not the events of the book were actual.