t is interesting to read about your discussions about Esther and Qumran. This has been a problem which has interested us since we started archaeological research at Qumran at the beginning of the 1990s. In my view the reasons, why the Book of Esther is missing at Qumran, and only the protoEsther exists, are both religious and archaeological.

The period, when Eshter became a very important book for the Jews, the Qumran-Essenes had already taken distance to Judaism building a splinter group comparable to the Jewish Therapeutae. The Damascus covenanters who apparently were related to the Qumran-Essenes thought that all the rest of Israel had gone astray and they only were holding the truth as the hidden things concerning also the calendaric periods had been revealed to them. This was also the opinion expressed in the Community Rule of Qumran.

As Qumran was occupied first around 150 B.C. in the Hellensitic period the book of Esther could not have belonged to the Qumran canon as the group had already taken distance to Judaism. L. Schiffman thinks that the Qumran-Essenes followed the Alexandrian canon, and our theory holds that the roots of the Qumran-Essenes are connected to Alexandrian Jews as the closest group is the Jewish Therapeutae living in Egypt and the only parallel texts to the Qumran library have been found at the Cairo Geniza of a Karaite synagogue in Egypt. The schoalrly community is projecting its modern views of present borders of Israel to Qumran, even the settlement emerged in the period when the region was under the Ptolemies and Seleucids. The solar calendar of Qumran is also another link that the Qumran-Essenes were Jews who had exilic roots in Egypt. The closest parallel “Scroll jars” come from Deir el-Medina in Egypt dated to c. 160 B.C. and the custom to preserve manuscript in jars was especially prominent in Egypt.

Anyway, for Jews the book of Esther is very precious Megillah like the Torah: it has in rabbinic literature meaning of “a shining star” (cf. Eshter) which shines in the end of the days when Jews are persecuted.

Dr. Minna Lonnqvist

I must look at Elior’s work: that’s a curious (and provocative!) suggestion…

Those (=Rachel Elior) who believe that there was more widespread acceptance of the solar calendar, even by the Pharisees (!), during the Second Temple period, would need to figure out how/why the Book of Esther was preserved during that period (assuming, of course, that it had already been written!).

Your point is a good one: the more you read a text within a particular tradition, the harder it is to look at it afresh. Borg wrote a book that was entitled, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. It might make a great title, but I don’t think that it’s actually possible!

Yes, of course once the text was studied enough, the connection between the two words became apparrent, but that doesn’t mean that there was authorial intention, or even that early readers of the story as Mordecai sent it out to the people of Persia would have.

It’s a very fine line between reading a text and reading into a text, made all the finer when dealing with ancient literature in no-longer-spoken languages. I believe you if you tell me that you simply don’t see this same connection, and I am even prepared to accept that it may not have been an intended one. I see it, but I can’t speak for the intended audience.

If God’s absence is one of the strongest themes in the text, and I’m happy to agree to that, I’m not sure that it is necessarily associated with Esther’s hidden identity. And certainly not with her name.

Raph’s essay was well-written, and it does provide a lot of food for thought (as does Raph, himself, most frequently). Do you not feel that this ambiguity (described by him and by you as the absence of middah k’neged middah) counts as a type of concealment? The Biblical authors did not shy away from using this word in a metaphorical sense, to which the existential example so often chosen by the midrashists would testify. Of all the themes within this story, is the one of the absent god’s absence not strongest of all?

The word Esther is midrashically related to the Hebrew word for concealment. But considering that Mordecai and Esther are not Hebrew names (Esther’s Hebrew name is given in the text as הדסה). With Persian as an Indo-European language, her name more likely relates to “star”, or to “astra” the Median word for myrtle (= הדסה) or to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar.

Your argument on the theme of concealment peters off. This idea does not seem to me to be as prominent as you suggest, although it becomes the main feature of Hasidic readings of the text (and anything related to purim) derived from Zoharic concepts of comparison between the revealed and hidden God.

There are many important contrasts and parallels in Esther, as you have highlighted, but there are in any good story. It is particularly prevalent here, and there is the concept of “נהפוך הוא”, of overturning, that is a textual theme.

At the same time, as you have also expressed, the characters thus become ironically equated, and their unremarkableness is prominent. The text thus reflects, somewhat a senselessness, arbitrary and fatalistic. Mordecai expresses that while it is clear that the Jews will meet deliverance one way or another, Esther’s only advantage is that she has been given the opportunity to do something (4:14). Raph Dascalu is quoted at length here noting that the true hiddenness in the text is the lack of middah keneged middah. While Haman at least was a “צרר היהודים” , an opressor (3:10; 8:1; 9:10,24), the other hundreds massacred by the Jews (purportedly at first in self defense), in the end (9:5), we get: “ויכו היהודים בכל-אויביהם, מכת-חרב והרג ואבדן; ויעשו בשונאיהם, כרצונם.” There is a lot of recklessness in the text, and this is a concealment quite apart from Esther’s hidden identity.