Esther - Yahweh Fades Away

Purim exalts and commemorates an ancient operation very much like 9/11. It glorifies the deceptions of Esther, who concealed her Jewish identity to seduce the King of Persia, then slyly tricked him into slaughtering 75,000 people deemed “enemies of the Jews.”

In other words, Purim celebrates Jews lying, secretly penetrating the highest levels of government, and manipulating the leaders of an empire into mass-murdering perceived “enemies of the Jewish people.”        Kevin Barrett http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/03/01/israel-celebrates-successful-911-operation-on-purim-holiday/

 Late Composition

Esther has to have been composed in the early centuries AD, maybe the first century, and here are four reasons why:

1.     It has no God,Yahweh has faded away - he’s gone forever.

2.     There are no tribes of Israel, just scattered ‘Jews’ around the Persian Empire.

3.     ‘The Jews’ have appeared, who did not exist or at least were never alluded to as such in the ancient world.

4.     It features people being converted to Judaism, which did not happen and was totally forbidden in earlier times. Judaism is here acquiring a non-tribal definition: Schlomo Sand in his powerful Invention of the Jewish people, described Judaism as being a proselytising religion in the early centuries AD.

In addition to these four, this story has evidently been composed in the aftermath of  some attempt to expel Jews, it’s a revenge tale concocted against someone who plots to do this. (For example, Jews were expelled from Rome in A.D.19.) That did not happen in the ancient world.

The Book of Esther is a mock-history story projected back in time, maybe into the sixth century BCE at the Persian court. Some surmise that the king Ahasuerus here alluded to was actually the Persian king known in Greek as Xerxes,

The story of Esther centres around the Jewish festival of Purim, celebrated over the Full Moon before the Spring Equinox, one month before the Passover full Moon. It was composed when that festival was in existence and explains it, like a Just-So story.

This book has the sexual vindictiveness and delight in mass murder which characteristically links it to the other OT books – but, what it’s doing in a Christian Bible is anyone’s guess!

It starts off with a drunk King Ahasuerus ordering his beautiful wife to appear and show herself off before a bunch of strangers. His eunuchs conveyed the command -

 to bring Queen Vashti before the king with her royal crown, in order to show the peoples and the princes her beauty; for she was fair to behold. (1:11)

She refuses, he divorces her, and takes instead a Jewish girl Esther to be his queen - with no idea of her background! A command to ‘destroy all Jews’ is imagined on the part of ‘Haman’ the king’s advisor, for a daft reason viz that one Jew at the gate has refused to bow down before him. (Ch 3).

Haman responds: 

 Then Haman said to King Ahasuerus, "There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom; their laws are different from those of every other people, and they do not keep the king's laws, so that it is not for the king's profit to tolerate them. 

That was indeed the perception of the Jews in the first century AD – but it would hardly I suggest apply to earlier centuries.

Esther is totally different from the other OT books – no tribes in Canaan, no wandering across a desert, no angry god, these are now all just distant memories, and instead God's Chosen  People are just scattered and dispersed through the Persian Empire.

The king weakly agrees, but then the charms of his new wife Esther start to work upon him and he gives her carte blanche -

And you may write as you please with regard to the Jews, in the name of the king, and seal it with the king's ring; for an edict written in the name of the king and sealed with the king's ring cannot be revoked."    (8:8)

What Jews like best

 ‘The Jews had light and gladness and joy and honour’ – only one thing would produce that! Yes it’s the mass murder of tens of thousands– including women and children - of the host nation which has been kindly looking after them for years and putting up with their funny habits:

By these the king allowed the Jews who were in every city to gather and defend their lives, to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, with their children and women, and to plunder their goods, upon one day throughout all the provinces of King Ahasuerus,  (8:11)

What bliss! Twice we are told about a spreading ‘fear of the Jews’ which converted people to the faith:

And in every province and in every city, wherever the king's command and his edict came, there was gladness and joy among the Jews, a feast and a holiday. And many from the peoples of the country declared themselves Jews, for the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them. (8:15-17)

 the Jews gathered in their cities throughout all the provinces of King Ahasuerus to lay hands on such as sought their hurt. And no one could make a stand against them, for the fear of them had fallen upon all peoples.  (9:3)

Serve people right for hating them:

So the Jews smote all their enemies with the sword, slaughtering, and destroying them, and did as they pleased to those who hated them. (9:5)

Queen Esther manages to petition for one more day of slaughter, and as a result 'seventy-five thousand of those who hated them (i.e., who hated Jews)' were slain (9:16) Seymour Light here reflected, that if Jews feel that people hate them, maybe they should check out the horrific texts of their sacred books, and the utter scorn they express towards the rest of the human race - and not brew up a dirty fantasy about slaughtering everyone who hates them. 

The two Full Moons before and after the spring Equinox are happy times of joie de vivre when spring blooms, and therefore top Satanists placed the two great mass-murder-of-innocent Jewish celebrations right over them: at Passover (slaughter of Egyptian children) and Purim (of Persian adults). Ever since then, Jewish human-sacrifice rituals have tended to coincide with those Full-Moon dates more than any others.

In this Book, Jews have imagined a feeble straw man as king of Persia, who licenses unlimited slaughter of his own people at the request of his pretty wife. This reminded Seymour Light of the initial Genesis story, where God's chosen People enter Egypt, and the Pharaoh appears as a feeble and credulous man who is totally manipulated and who allows the Hebrews to take control of his country. Then in Jonah the king of the great and ancient city of Ninevah is described as a feeble and credulous nutcase, who is totally guided by a Hebrew. Maybe Jews were people who could not really see other people as they were, except as through some Jewish-supremacist terms. 

We opened with a quote from Kevin Barrett averring that this book showed Jews as 'lying' to achieve their goals. Seymour Light thought long and hard about this. So many, many countries have passed decrees to expel Jews, over two thousand years, and the Book of Esther shows how Jews are not prepared to wonder why this should be. Instead, they changed the decree to 'exterminate' - that a decree was going forth for them to be wiped out. But no-one has ever wished to do that - that is the lie. One could make a comment here to a certain 20th-century event in this context, but I'll refrain.