It does not belong to our present task to discuss the historical value of these sources; but it may not be amiss to say that the authority of the Memoirs of Nehemiah alone is unimpeached. The question is of peculiar interest in the case of the supposed Memoirs of Ezra, because Neh. 8 has been generally understood by recent critics to be the account of the formal introduction of a new, or newly codified, law, the Priests' Code or the Pentateuch, which Ezra brought up from Babylonia.
CHAPTER XIV
STORY BOOKS: ESTHER, RUTH, JONAH
Besides the older and younger historical books we have been considering, the Jewish Bible contains some examples of what we should call the short story, and the church has preserved others. The canonical books of this class are Esther, Ruth, and Jonah; among the apocrypha are Judith and Tobit; others, such as 3 Maccabees, are found in manuscripts of the Greek and Latin Bibles, or in Oriental translations, but did not attain official recognition of any of the great churches. These stories, which, as might be expected, differ widely in literary quality as well as in subject and motive, are doubtless only the rare survivors of a larger literature of this kind, but they suffice to give us a notion of the popular reading of the Jews in the last centuries before the Christian era. It would be more exact, perhaps, to say the popular story-telling, for probably the written books were chiefly used by the story-tellers, who reproduced their contents orally and freely, just as the Moslem story-tellers to-day recite stories from the Arabian Nights or the Antar romance. Some of them, however, like Esther, attached themselves to popular festivals and were recited or read as part of the celebration.
Esther.—Esther is the story of a beautiful Jewess of Susa whom Xerxes raises from the ranks of his concubines to be his queen, and who uses her influence over him to save her people from a general massacre which the grand vizier has prepared for them by way of avenging an affront from one of the race. The plot is developed with noteworthy art. The deposition of Vashti, which, so far as the main matter goes, is necessary only to make room for Esther, under the author's hand becomes a brilliant first act. The embroilment of Mordecai and Haman is skilfully managed; the stiffnecked Jew refuses homage to the proud vizier, who schemes a generous revenge. Esther ventures her life for her people by intruding into the audience chamber, but the dénouement is artfully retarded—instead of a pathetic plea for the imperilled Jews, an invitation for the king and his prime minister to a petit dîner in the queen's apartments! At the banquet the king offers Esther her wish, but again the issue is postponed. Haman, in his elation at such signal marks of queenly favour, builds a gallows for Mordecai seventy-five feet high—and next day has to parade the streets of the capital at the bridle of the hated Jew's horse proclaiming him the object of the king's special honour!
The scene in the banqueting hall when Esther at last makes her petition is highly dramatic. She makes it a plea for her own life, "for we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and to perish." The king, who has no inkling that she is a Jewess, and is incensed at the thought of such a plot against his queen, angrily asks, "Who is he, and where is he, that durst presume in his heart to do so?" The climax so skilfully prepared comes in the stunning words, "This wicked Haman here!" Thenceforth the action matches swiftly: the king bursts out of the room to collect himself by a turn in the garden; the fallen vizier sinks a suppliant on the queen's couch, where the king, returning, finds him; the sinister eunuch standing by describes the fine new gallows Haman has at home, ready for Mordecai, and on his own gallows, in poetic justice, Haman is hanged, fifty cubits high! Mordecai succeeds to the seal of state, and conceives the counter-stroke by which, instead of the heathen massacring the Jews, the Jews slaughter the heathen. An annual festival celebrates the joyful issue.
For the full account of Mordecai's greatness the reader is referred to the royal annals of Media and Persia, where it will be found, he says, recorded along with the mighty deeds of Xerxes, including his subjugation of the Greeks. Despite this authority, it should be unnecessary to say that the Book of Esther is a work of fiction. Whether it is pure invention, or whether some of the incidents are borrowed from fact, is an idle question, because a wholly unanswerable one. If the local colour, which is laid on pretty thick, is good, as some modern archæologists aver, it would not be strange that a Jewish novelist who wrote not so long after the passing of Persia should prove as well acquainted with it as a modern archæologist.
Some recent interpreters find in the story a mythical background: Esther is Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love; Mordecai, "Marduk's man," was originally Marduk himself, the great god of Babylon; the name of Haman sounds something like one way of pronouncing the name of an Elamite god in the epic of Gilgamesh. The triumph of Mordecai and Esther over Haman would thus be an echo of ancient strife between the gods of Babylonia and Elam. It will be obvious, however, to the mythologically unsophisticated understanding, that if these very problematical combinations are right, the author of the Book of Esther was quite innocent of them, and therefore that for the interpretation of the story he tells they are wholly irrelevant.
The Book of Esther, it was long ago observed, is singular among the books of the Bible in that there is no mention of God in it. It is Jewish with a sanguinary loyalty to race, but of Judaism as religion there is not a trace; it is in fact somewhat obtrusive by its absence. When Mordecai warns Esther that if she fails her people in their hour of need deliverance will come "from another place," the word God is ostentatiously avoided; before her great adventure she fasts three days, but there is no suggestion of prayer; in the celebrations of rescue and the annual commemoration of it there is feasting and gladness, but no thanksgiving to God. It is no wonder that orthodox rabbis doubted the inspiration of so conspicuously secular romance, nor that the Greek translators made good the religious deficiencies of the book by putting pious prayers into the mouth of Mordecai and Esther at the appropriate junctures.