Context at a Glance
Author:Traditional Attribution
Topic:esther Chapter 10 Study
This chapter provides a foundational look at the theological themes of esther, analyzed across multiple historic translations for maximum scholarly depth.
Esther 10
New Revised Standard Version
1King Ahasuerus laid tribute on the land and on the islands of the sea.
2All the acts of his power and might, and the full account of the high honor of Mordecai, to which the king advanced him, are they not written in the annals of the kings of Media and Persia?
3For Mordecai the Jew was next in rank to King Ahasuerus, and he was powerful among the Jews and popular with his many kindred, for he sought the good of his people and interceded for the welfare of all his descendants. INTRO TO THE POETICAL AND WISDOM BOOKS
958INTRODUCTION TO THE POETICAL AND WISDOM BOOKS Contents and Placement The Poetical and Wisdom Books — Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon — do not form a totally coherent unit, especially when compared to other canonical divisions, such as the Historical Books or the Prophetic Books. These fives books were written or collected at widely different times and consist of a number of literary types: love poetry (the Song of Solomon), Temple liturgy (Psalms), and wisdom literature (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes). It is also likely that they entered the canon for quite different reasons: Psalms was used for prayers; the Song of Solomon was probably first canonized as an ancient erotic poem used in wedding ceremonies; while Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes may have been placed together in the canon because all three belong to a category of writings known as wisdom literature. "Wisdom literature" describes works that do not focus on the nation Israel, on its great formative historical memories, such as Exodus and conquest, on the Temple and Jerusalem, and on covenant as the central theological notion binding together God, the people Israel, and the land of Israel. Wisdom books are thus in some ways a departure from the concerns of other biblical books. They share, rather, as their focus, reflection on universal human concerns, especially the understanding of individual experiences and the maintenance of ordered relationships that lead both to success on the human (social) plane and to divine approval. In more recent scholarship, the concept of "wisdom" has been criticized as too elastic and amorphous. Indeed, the three wisdom books in this collection are remarkably different from one another and do not form a clear unit: Proverbs, in contrast to Job, suggest that the righteous are rewarded and do not suffer, while Ecclesiastes, in contrast to both Job and Proverbs, is deeply skeptical of INTRO TO THE POETICAL AND WISDOM BOOKS
959the utility of wisdom. In addition, "wisdom" is a modern category, deriving from the beginning of the twentieth century, and thus Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes were not originally grouped together on generic grounds. They nevertheless share a thematic interdependence. Proverbs provides a normative version of a type of ancient Near Eastern thought that looked for pattern and repetition in nature and in the moral life. In this tradition, the regular recurrence of natural phenomena could provide an analogy to guide human beings in their social interactions: As charcoal is to hot embers and wood to fire, so is a quarrelsome person for kindling strife (26.21). The inevitability of the natural occurrence is mirrored in the inevitability of the social one. This kind of thinking then was extended to moral behavior, with the argument that good behavior, like good farming practice, will be rewarded: Anyone who tends a fig tree will eat its fruit, and anyone who takes care of a master will be honored (27.18). Job and Ecclesiastes relate to this normative tradition in different ways. Job denies the inevitability of rewards for living an upright life and decisively refutes the idea that human suffering is always deserved. Ecclesiastes treats the idea of inevitability in another way: The natural repetitions of seasons, tasks, and occupations become the image of futility. Each therefore, depends on the reader's acquaintance with the normative tradition. It should be noted that the themes of the wisdom tradition are continued in the Apocryphal/ Deuterocanonical books of the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), both of which combine didactic themes and style familiar especially from the book of Proverbs with retrospective summaries of Israel's history. Though these five books are loosely described as Poetical Books, they are not all poetry, nor are all biblical poetic works found in this canonical section. Although Ecclesiastes contains some poetical sections, such as the poem of 3.1-8 ("For everything there is a INTRO TO THE POETICAL AND WISDOM BOOKS
960season..."), or quoted poetic proverbs (e.g., 7.1-6), the book is predominantly prose. Additionally, the nature of the poetry in these books is quite different, ranging from the highly structured, largely static poetry of Proverbs, to the intensely erotic, more free-flowing poetry of Song of Solomon. The creation of a canonical division called the "Poetical Books" is a relatively late development. In Jewish tradition these five books are included in the Writings, the third division of the canon; their order varies in different sources. The earliest evidence for seeing these five books as a unit comes from the second century CE, though it took many centuries for these five books, in the order found here, to be recognized as the third section of the Bible. The order of these books was variable, and some traditions placed them at the end of the Christian Old Testament, while others put them as the second part of that book immediately following the Pentateuch. Its current placement in English Bibles follows some manuscript traditions which most likely sought to organize the first section of the Bible by placing the Torah, the most authoritative section, first, followed by works about the past (the Historical Books), books about the present (the Poetical Books), and books about the future (the Prophetic Books). This arrangement, which places the prophets last, would be especially significant once the Hebrew Bible became the Old Testament and was seen as a kind of introduction to the New Testament. The Prophetic Books would then immediately precede the Gospels as prophecy followed by fulfillment. Authorship At least four of the five Poetical Books cohere in terms of traditionally ascribed authorship. Many of the Psalms contain superscriptions or titles incorporating "of David," and many early Jewish and Christian traditions ascribe the Psalter as a whole to David. Proverbs 1.1 ("The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel"), 10.1, and 25.1 explicitly ascribe (sections of) that book to Solomon. Ecclesiastes, in its opening chapter, presents itself as the work of "the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem" (1.12; cf. 1.1); Jewish and Christian tradition understands this royal teacher to be Solomon, who is described in
1Kings as being exceedingly rich, just like the protagonist INTRO TO THE POETICAL AND WISDOM BOOKS
961of Ecclesiastes. Finally, the Song of Solomon opens with an explicit (but secondary) ascription of authorship: "The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's." Given the clear connection of Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon to David and Solomon, it is noteworthy that some early Christian interpreters connected Job as well to the period of Solomon. It is thus likely that this canonical division of five books came into being as the compilations connected to David and Solomon, and was only secondarily labeled the "Poetical Books." The traditional attributions of authorship, however, have for the most part been rejected by modern scholarship; see the Introduction to each book for a detailed discussion. The Characteristics of Biblical Poetry These books do, as noted above, incorporate a large amount of poetry, so it is appropriate to here examine the basic structures of biblical poetry. Poetry is a cross-cultural phenomenon: Most cultures distinguish between an everyday type of discourse (prose), and heightened discourse (poetry, and also philosophy). This heightening may be accomplished in a number of different ways, which include the use of figuration (e.g., metaphor, simile), meter, and certain types of sound patterning, such as alliteration and rhyme. Yet there is no crosscultural pattern for poetry. Thus Hebrew poetry, unlike its classical English counterpart, has neither (true) rhythm nor rhyme; nevertheless, it is poetic in that it uses certain devices in significant enough concentration to distinguish it from everyday speech, or prose. Obviously, the prose-poetry distinction is relative rather than absolute; as in English, we may speak of poetic prose or prosaic poetry. Thus, "pure prose" and "pure poetry" should be seen as opposites on a continuum, within which a large variety of possibilities evince themselves in the Bible as in other literary traditions. The main shared characteristic between typical English poetry and biblical poetry is the use of figuration. This may be seen, for example, in Ps 23. The central image of this psalm is introduced by the metaphor, "The Lord is my shepherd" (v. 1). The following verses unveil or clarify the meaning of this metaphor, noting in vv. 22-3 how God, the ideal shepherd, tends his people/sheep: INTRO TO THE POETICAL AND WISDOM BOOKS
962He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name's sake. Psalm
1is characterized by a set of two contrasting similes: the righteous ...are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither (v. 3), while the wicked "are like chaff that the wind drives away" (v. 4). The Song of Solomon is especially rich in similes and metaphors, as in the beginning of ch 2: I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens. As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. The main characteristic of biblical poetry, nevertheless, is not figuration, but parallelism, in which most poetic lines may be divided into two (or sometimes three) parts; the second part of the line is intimately connected to the first part, and typically seconds it in some way. For example, Ps 6.2 reads: Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror. The verse clearly divides into two more or less equal sections, and each element in the first part is mirrored, seconded, or paralleled in the INTRO TO THE POETICAL AND WISDOM BOOKS
963second: Be gracious to me || heal me; O Lord || O Lord; for I am languishing || for my bones are shaking with terror. This parallelism, which is not typical of biblical prose, serves as the backbone of biblical poetry. Since the eighteenth century, it has been customary to see three main types of parallelism in the Bible: synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic. The quotation above from Ps 6.2 is an example of synonymous parallelism. Antithetical parallelism can be seen in Prov 10.1: A wise child makes a glad father, but a foolish child is a mother's grief. In this balanced, two-part line, "a wise child" is antithetical, or opposite, to "a foolish child," and "makes a glad father" is antithetical to "is a mother's grief." In synthetic parallelism, the second part of the line completes the thought of the first part, and is neither the same nor the opposite. For example, Song 1.9 reads: I compare you, my love, to a mare among Pharaoh's chariots. Here the second part concludes the thought of the first. The appropriateness of the three labels — synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic — which were accepted in biblical scholarship for two centuries, has now been called into question on several grounds. First, some have noted that languages have no true synonyms; thus "synonymous parallelism" is a misleading term. Furthermore, very often two parallel words can be similar, but are not truly synonymous, as may be seen in the example of Ps 6.2: "I am languishing" || "my bones are shaking with terror." The term antithetical parallelism has been questioned because not all elements of part B are the antithesis of part A. This may be seen in the example from Prov 10.1, where "child" is used in both parts A and B; a true antithesis might contrast a "wise child" with a "foolish parent." Finally, "synthetic" has been criticized as too vague a term. These criticisms should not be INTRO TO THE POETICAL AND WISDOM BOOKS
964underestimated. Nevertheless, the three terms, if understood as ideal types from which actual lines may deviate to a greater or lesser extent, remain useful. A much more serious criticism of the classical model emerged in the mid-1980s when several scholars began to question the notion that parallelism is formulaic in that the second half of the poetic line typically adds little to the line, but merely seconds it. Several scholars have suggested just the opposites, that the second part heightens or extends the first. Thus, the typical biblical verse should be read "A, and even more so, B." According to this model, which has gained substantial support in the last two decades, we would not read Ps 6.2b, "O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror" as a type of filler that merely restates "Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing." Rather we would understand the verse as a whole as: "Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing," and moreover, "O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror," where the claim "for my bones are shaking with terror" is a more vivid description that intensifies the verse's opening "for I am languishing." Sometimes it is quite clear that the second part of the verse does not merely parallel the first but does go beyond it in some significant fashion, and thus justifies this newer model. Yet, there are a substantial number of cases in which the second part actually does seem to function as a mere filler, carrying little if any semantic weight, let alone intensifying the first. For example, the major image of Ps
121is the ability of God to protect the individual. This is expressed at the psalm's center, where God is imagined metaphorically as a "shade" (v. 5) from the intense Mediterranean heat. The psalm continues (v. 6): "The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night." Clearly, the second part, "nor the moon by night" is not an intensification; in fact, it makes no sense, since no one in ancient Israel was afflicted with moonburn or moonstroke. The second part here is probably an antithetical filler and carries no semantic weight. It should be seen as part of an ancient Near Eastern and biblical patter of word pairs, where a particular word (e.g., "sun" or "father") automatically evokes a realted ("synonymous" or "antithetical") word (e.g., "moon" or "mother"). INTRO TO THE POETICAL AND WISDOM BOOKS
965Thus, parallelism is much more complicated than would appear on the surface. Clearly it is characterized by sets of lines, each of which may be divided into two parts, typically of the same length and mirroring each other on the semantic, syntactic, and phonological levels. It is unclear if the second should typically be read as an intensification of the first, or as a filler that carries little or no semantic value. This uncertainty is extremely frustrating, not only because it leaves us unsure how to read much of biblical poetry, especially the extent to which we do or do not need to pay close attention to the second half of the line, but also because our understanding of biblical poetry will affect our reconstruction of many Israelite institutions. To return to Prov 10.1 — "A A wise child makes a glad father, but a foolish child is a mother's grief" — if we follow the older understanding of parallelism, the second half is largely a filler, indicating that the father had the major role in the child's upbringing in ancient Israel, while if we follow the newer understanding, where the second intensifies the first, the mother was primarily responsible for the child. Another area that has engendered significant controversy over the last few decades concerns the extent to which meter or rhythm existed in biblical poetry. Much of this debate concerns the definition of meter. In English and other modern Western languages, meter is generally understood as a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables; if this is how we should understand it in biblical poetic texts, these texts in their current form lack meter or rhythm. Metrical patterns can only be found in biblical texts if they are emended or reconstructed extensively. There is, however, a tendency for the parts of each line, in most poetic genres, to be approximately the same length. There is some possibility that this reflects the remnant of some metrical system, and that at an earlier time, each part had not only the same length, but the same meter, but this pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables has been lost as a result of changes in the pronunciation of ancient Hebrew. More likely, the similarity of length is part of the larger system of parallelism, which encouraged each part to mirror its counterpart in length, as well as in semantic, syntactic, and phonological structure. Scholars have until recently been primarily concerned with the line as the main unit of biblical poetry. This is not really surprising, given how foreign biblical parallelism is to the modern Western (but not the INTRO TO THE POETICAL AND WISDOM BOOKS
966ancient Near Eastern) ear. This interest in the line has obscured the significance of the strophe or stanza and of the poem as a whole. But the last few decades have seen a legitimate return to these larger units. For example, it had become a habit when studying passages like Job
3to concentrate solely on the parallelism of lines like v. 5: Let gloom and deep darkness claim it. Let clouds settle upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. Now, in addition to this type of analysis, scholars study how the poet uses images of day and night, light and darkness, throughout the chapter, in order to create this exquisite poem. This is not, however, an either-or proposition: By studying how the individual line functions as poetry and how these lines join together into stanzas, which combine into complete poems, we gain a much fuller appreciation and understanding of these Poetical Books. Copyright ©2001, New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version. Ed. Michael D. Coogan. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Used by permission. All rights reserved. JOB
967JOB Introduction The book of Job is named after its protagonist, innocent man who suffered loss and endured pain through no fault of his own. For many, the man Job is most well-known through the cliché about "the patience of Job," derived from the traditional translation of Jas 5.11. The Greek term that is translated as "patience," however, means not so much patience as "endurance," "persistence," or "steadfastness." And, indeed, the Job that one encounters in the book that bears his name is not patient, but he is persistent in his claim that he has suffered undeservedly. The provenance of the book is unknown. Its author is anonymous, while its date and place of origin are matters of debate. Most scholars places the bulk of the book, if not its final form, somewhere between the seventh and the fourth centuries BCE, although also recognizing that the final form is the result of a complex history of transmission. The prose framework, what are now the book's prologue (1.1-2.13) and epilogue (42.7.17), consists of a narrative that is likely based on an ancient folktale about the undeserved suffering and final restoration of the protagonist. The rest of the book consists of dialogues (written in poetic style) between Job and the friends who had ostensibly come to comfort him (3.1-31.40), and between Job and God (38.1-42.6). Intruding into this material are a poetic interlude on the inaccessibility of Wisdom (28.1-28) and the speeches of Elihu (32.1-37.24) that appear to have been added at a later time. Interpreters have called attention to certain linguistic and stylistic shifts, as well as occasional inconsistencies in the story line. Such discrepancies have bee explained in terms of multiple authors, a single author with multiple sources, a primary work that has been redacted two or three times, or a single author who has worked with the materials over a long period of time. JOB
968Whatever the truth, the book in its present form must be read as a whole. Although the book of Job in its entirety is unique in ancient literature, it draws on a variety of traditions and genres that were known throughout the ancient Near East. The character of Job himself is presented as a non-Israelite from the land of Uz (perhaps northern Arabia), and it is likely that versions of the story of Job were told by many of the peoples of the region. In the sixth century BCE the prophet Ezekiel mentions Job, along with Noah and Dan'el, as heroes of antiquity who saved others by their righteousness (Ezek 14.14, 20). Despite its mention by Ezekiel, this Dan'el (spelled "Daniel" in the NRSV translation, but footnoted as "Danel") is not the same Daniel as the biblical book of that name, but an ancient Canaanite king whose story is known from the tablets found in the ruins of the second millennium BCE city of Ugarit. Similar to Ezekiel's setting of Job among the legendary figures of antiquity is the way in which the prose tale presents Job as someone who apparently lived in the remote ancestral period. The influence of ancient Near Eastern literary forms and traditions are also evident in the poetic dialogues. The problem of enigmatic suffering was one that was explored in Mesopotamian literature in poetic compositions in whihc a righteous or emblematic sufferer described his sufferings, his confusion about the cause of his misery, and his passionate desire for restoration (e.g., "I will Praise the Lord of Wisdom" and the "Sumerian Job"). The most striking similarity, however, exists between the dialogue sections of Job and "The Babylonian Theodicy." In this composition an unnamed sufferer and his friend speak alternately in a cycle of twenty-seven speeches. The sufferer protests his misery, describing the injustice of the world and the unfairness of the gods. His friend attempts to defend the rationality of the world and urges his friend to seek the mercy of the gods. In contrast to Job, however, "The Babylonian Theodicy" ends without any appearance of the deity or narrative resolution. JOB
969Finally, the book of Job contains many allusions to mythological traditions known throughout the ancient Near East. Repeated reference is made to the cosmogonic struggle between God and the sea, especially as represented by the dragon of chaos, Rahab or Leviathan (3.8; 7.12; 10.13; 26.12/ 38.3-11; 41.1-34). It is often suggested that the long descriptions of Behemoth and Leviathan in chs 40-41 draw on Egyptian imagery from the myths of Horus and Seth. The descriptions of creation and of cosmic geography in chs
26and
38also evoke the mythic traditions common to Israel and the other cultures of the Near East. Like other wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible, the book of Job does not make reference to specific Israelite legal or historical traditions. It does, however, make a rich use of psalmic and other wisdom traditions. In the dialogues the characters often make use of proverbs (e.g., 5.10, 17; 8.11; 12.11) or hymns (e.g., 5.8-16). Job is particularly adept at evoking a hymn or psalm only to parody it. Although the clearest example is his parody of Psalm
8in 7.17-19, he uses this technique often (9.5-12; 12.1325). The enigma of the suffering of the righteous and the good fortune of the wicked was one addressed by Israelite literature, both in the psalms and in other wisdom texts. Although not prominent in the book of Proverbs, it emerges more strongly in the later wisdom books of Ecclesiastes and Sirach. Several Psalms also address aspects of these issues (Ps 37; 39; 49; 73), but they do not exhibit the radical protest and questioning that one finds in the book of Job. Distinctive to the book of Job is the way it situates these issues. The book is neither a treatise on innocent suffering, as often supposed, nor an apology for God's justice in the face of inexplicable human suffering. Rather, the principal theological issue that the book raises is, ironically, the question posed by the adversary in the divine council (see 1.9): Will mortals be religious ("fear God") apart from rewards and punishment? As the dialogue develops, however, the questions of divine justice that torture Job's mind are not satisfactorily met by the arguments of the friends. Job himself seeks to imagine a way in which he might go to trial with God for a vindication of his righteousness and JOB
970perhaps an acknowledgment from God of God's mistreatment of Job (9.2-35; 13.13-28; 16.18-22; 19.23-27; 23.1-7; 31.35-37). Yet when God answers Job, it is neither as the friends have imagined God would speak nor as Job had hoped God would answer him. The meaning and significance of the divine speeches continue to be among the most debated issues of the book. Some interpret the speeches as a repudiation of a human's right to question God. Others understand them as a necessary correction to Job's too limited understanding of the nature of the cosmos as a place where all suffering can be reduced to legal categories of guilt or innocence. All agree that the extraordinary beauty of the poetry is part of its meaning. Perhaps the very elusiveness of the divine speeches implies that no answer from God to Job's questions can satisfy the human intellect. But as is known by anyone, that is not true to our experience as humans. We yearn for a response to the problem of evil, and continue to in part because the book of Job provided no answer for us. Yet the ending suggest that there is a resolution to be found in the depths of a pious life lived before a mysterious God.
1The king levied a tax upon his kingdom both by land and sea.
2And as for his power and bravery, and the wealth and glory of his kingdom, they were recorded in the annals of the kings of the Persians and the Medes.
3Mordecai acted with authority on behalf of King Artaxerxes and was great in the kingdom, as well as honored by the Jews. His way of life was such as to make him beloved to his whole nation. ADDITION F Epilogue: Mordecai's dream explained
4And Mordecai said, "These things have come from God;
5for I remember the dream that I had concerning these matters, and none of them has failed to be fulfilled.
6There was the little spring that became a river, and there was light and sun and abundant water — the river is Esther, whom the king married and made queen.
7The two dragons are Haman and myself.
8The nations are those that gathered to destroy the name of the Jews.
9And my nation, this is Israel, who cried out to God and was saved. The Lord has saved his people; the Lord has rescued us from all these evils; God has done great signs and wonders, wonders that have never happened among the nations.
10For this purpose he made two lots, one for the people of God and one for all the nations,
11and these two lots came to the hour and moment and day of decision before God and among all the nations.
12And God remembered his people and vindicated his inheritance.
13So they will observe these days in the month of Adar, on the fourteenth and fifteenth of that month, with an assembly and joy and gladness before God, from generation to generation forever among his people Israel."