How historically accurate is the book of Esther? Can we relate its narrative and characters to any historical character?

Question

I am aware that biblical accounts and secular history are not always easy to reconcile, and can often contradict each other at first sight. When this happens, the reaction is usually to defend either secular history, given its multiple contributors and sources, or the Bible, given its supposedly inerrant character.

I particularly like to believe in both sides, and I believe that there must always be some alternative for conciliation between the biblical and secular narrative, and so far this has been working, in the most of the time. But the book of Esther has been a challenge in itself.

Now it came to pass in the days of Ahasuerus, (this is Ahasuerus which reigned, from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and seven and twenty provinces) [...]

– Esther 1:1 (KJV)

The King Ahasuerus (Ahashverosh, in the original hebrew) is usually related to King Xerxes (Khshayarsha in the original Persian language, being Ahashverosh the Hebrew transliteration of the name, based on the Babylonian Ahsiyarsu) and here we face a problem.

The Xerxes' queen is known and has a name, Amestris, which was together with Xerxes from the beginning of his reign, and continued to exert influence even after this. Another important piece of information is that she was the daughter of a Persian nobleman, Otanes, and is usually described as being notoriously cruel and vindictive. But this does not find any support when we compare it with the two queens mentioned in the book of Esther, that is, Esther herself and Queen Vashti.

In the third year of his reign, he [Ahasuerus] made a feast unto all his princes and his servants; [...] Also Vashti the queen made a feast for the women in the royal house which belonged to king Ahasuerus. [...]

– Esther 1:3a,9 (KJV)

Amestris could not be Vashti, since the latter only reigns for three years when she is replaced by Esther. Amestris also cannot be Esther, since the latter has Jewish origins and not in the Persian nobility, furthermore, the description of cruel and vindictive does not seem appropriate to what we see of Esther. So, how to combine these two sources?

I personally see that there can only be two possibilities, as I do not think it is valid to ignore secular history nor to dismiss Esther as a true and historical account. So, either Vashti and Esther were not really queens, being in fact just concubines, and the expression is just a mere hyperbole of the author, who perhaps considered Esther equivalent to a queen given her importance in history, or Ahasuerus cannot be Xerxes.

In the first hypothesis, in addition to having to assume a biblical error, albeit minimal, it seems strange to me that a concubine promotes a party in the name of the king, instead of the actual queen. Apart from that, Why would one concubine need to be replaced, when there are several others?

In the second hypothesis, it is important to highlight that the LXX translates Ahasuerus as Artaxerxes instead Xerxes, and although his queen is also known, Damaspia, nothing is known about her origins or duration of time when he was with Artaxerxes, except that their deaths occurred in the same year. This seems adequate to fit her into the biblical account, perhaps with Esther and Damaspia being different names for the same person. Perhaps this even justified Artaxerxes' benevolence towards the Jews by sending Ezra (Ezra 7:1-6), perhaps through the intercession of Esther.

However, as problems we have the fact that Artaxerxes (in Hebrew, Arkhshshsa) have a clear and distinct name of Ahasuerus (Ahashverosh) in the original Hebrew text, the two names are even mentioned at same time in the book of Ezra:

‭And in the reign of Ahasuerus, in the beginning of his reign, wrote they unto him an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem.

And in the days of Artaxerxes wrote Bishlam, Mithredath, Tabeel, and the rest of their companions, unto Artaxerxes king of Persia; and the writing of the letter was written in the Syrian tongue, and interpreted in the Syrian tongue.

– Ezra 4:6-7 (KJV)

Here it is clearly evident that the two names refer to different people, however, the name Ahasuerus occurs another time in the book of Daniel, and here he seems to portray a totally different person:

‭In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, of the seed of the Medes, which was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans; [...]

– Daniel 9:1 (KJV)

This Darius, commonly referred to as "Darius the Mede" is generally related to Cyaxares II, supposed last Median king before the Persian conquest by Cyrus the Great. It is worth mentioning that its existence is controversial, and there are those who believe that the last Median king was Astyages, his father. Whichever of the two versions one considers, the fact is that neither of them had a father named Xerxes, which leaves room for the name Ahasuerus to have been used to refer to different kings.

A second problem, however, is Mordecai's age:

Now in Shushan the palace there was a certain Jew, whose name was Mordecai, the son of Jair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish, a Benjamite; who had been carried away from Jerusalem with the captivity which had been carried away with Jeconiah king of Judah, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away.

Esther 2:5-6 (KJV)

This deportation occurred during the second siege of Jerusalem, in 597 BC. Xerxes' reign began in 486 BC, which makes Mordecai at least over 114 years old in the events of Esther. If this already seems unlikely, it becomes impossible to reconcile when we consider Artaxerxes, who began to reign in 465 BC, making Mordecai over 132 years old. This obviously leads us to try to test the kings before Xerxes, and see if any of them provide any suitable scenario:

• Going back from there, we have Darius the Great, whose wife was none other than the daughter of Cyrus the great, eliminating him as a possibility.
• Bardiya was an impostor, and barely reigned just a few months, also discarded.
• Cambyses II was married to his sisters, and in other versions with Phaedymia, who coincidentally was the sister of Amestris, the Xerxes' wife. Also discarded.
• Finally, we come to Cyrus the Great, whose wife is not only well known, but Cyrus' importance to the Jews makes it unlikely that he would be referred to by any other name. The other Persian kings are completely out of the cogitation, for obvious reasons.

In the end, it seems to me that no alternative that can be proposed seems to solve the problem, how then can reconcile Esther with the known history?

Answer 1

How historically accurate is the Book of Esther? Can we relate its narrative and characters to any historical characters?

I can give information which helps answer the first part of your question.

A number of points should be made:-

1. "who had been carried away from Jerusalem with the captivity which had been carried away with Jeconiah king of Judah, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away (Esther 2:5,6)" This is not referring to Mordecai, but to Kish, his great grandfather.

2. The Ahasuerus of the Bible is Xerxes, the Greek name. His name in Avestan (Zoroastrian), when transliterated into English is something close to "Khshhershe" ("The Story of Writing", by Andrew Robinson, 1995, page 75). The first scholar to attempt a decipherment of ancient cuneiform was Georg Grotefend (1775-1853); this was subsequent to Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815) realizing there were three different cuneiform scripts (for three languages) at Persopolis. Grotefend started with what turned out to be Old Persian, and used his knowledge of other languages and of history, both secular and Old Testament, to discover the cuneiform symbols for several letters. The three names he located and deciphered were Da-a-ra-ya-va-u-sh (Darius); his son Kh-sh-h-e-r-sh-e (Ahasuerus); and the father of Darius, Vi-i-sha-ta-a-sa-pa (Hystaspes). (The "-es" suffix in both "Xerxes" and Hystaspes" are typical Greek language additions.) To be brief, there is no doubt that Ahasuerus in the Bible is the Xerxes of Greek history, the son of Darius, the son of Hystaspes. The association of Xerxes with Ahasuerus played a key role in the decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform, which itself played a key role in the decipherment of all the other cuneiform scripts.

3. The Book of Esther, probably more than any other source, both biblical and secular, gives us the best evidence that there was a single empire consisting of both the Medes and the Persians.. the Medo-Persian Empire. This has been corroborated by archaeological discovery, especially the Persopolis staircase mural showing equality between Median nobles and Persian nobles, as identified by different headdresses.

4. When French archaeologists discovered the foundations and layout of the Palace of Ahasuerus at Susa they found a remarkable match between the layout and the description of the Palace that is found here and there in the Book of Esther:

But a further, and peculiarly conclusive, testimony to the historical character of the book is afforded by the recovery of the palace of Xerxes and Esther. An inscription of Artaxerxes Mnemon found at Susa tells us that the palace was destroyed by fire in the days of Artaxerxes Longimanus, the son and successor of Xerxes. Within some 30 years, therefore, from the time of Esther, that palace passed from the knowledge of men. Nevertheless, the references in the book are in perfect accord with the plan of the great structure as laid bare by the recent French excavations.

We read (Esther 4) that Mordecai, clad in sackcloth, walked in "the broad palace of the city, which was before the king's gate." The ruins show that the House of the Women was on the East side of the palace next to the city, and that a gate led from it into "the street of the city."

In Esther 5:1, we read that Esther "stood in the inner court of the king's house, over against the king's house." "The king," we also read, "sat upon his royal throne in the royal house, over against the entrance of the house," and that from the throne he "saw Esther the queen standing in the court."

Every detail is exact. A corridor led from the House of the Women to the inner court; and at the side of the court opposite to the corridor was the hall, or throne-room of the palace. Exactly in the centre of the farther wall the throne was placed and from that lofty seat the king, overlooking an intervening screen, saw the queen waiting for an audience.

Other details, such as that of the king's passing from the queen's banqueting-house into the garden, show a similarly exact acquaintance with the palace as it then was. That is a confirmation the force of which it is hard to overestimate. It shows that the writer was well informed and that his work is characterized by minute exactitude. (See International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, (Free Online), "Esther - the Book of", "8. Confirmations of the Book").

5. Certain details in the book identify a knowledge of Persian custom and culture, of which I shall only name here the royal colours of Persia - white and violet (or blue); and the fact that the king used the King's Seal to "sign" documents.

6. There are several words used in Esther of Persian origin which have no loan-word equivalents in other languages used in lands closer to the land of Israel/the Levant/Palestine. For instance, the word translated "Satraps" comes from the Persian "Ahashdarpenim" - 3:12, 8:9, 9:3; "royal" comes from the Persian "Akshtarnim" - 8:10, 8:14. Further, there are no Greek loanwords in Esther. Craig Davis identifies ten words of Persian origin in the Book of Esther ("Dating the Old Testament", 2007, RJ Communications, page 401).

7. As if the above points were not enough, we also have, still celebrated by Jews worldwide today, the annual Feast of Purim. Such a celebration could not have simply sprung up out of nowhere, with no historical events to commemorate.

All of these taken together leave little doubt the book is historically accurate; written by someone familiar with the Palace layout before it was destroyed by fire; the King Ahasuerus of Esther is the king better known from Greek historians as Xerxes.

The problem of with identifying who is Esther herself by comparison with the secular historical records is made more difficult by the common feature of Biblical historical accounts.. God has a particular aim in all biblical writings, which is of a spiritual nature: the Bible does not always give details which we would really find helpful to identify events more easily.

Maybe more archaeological data will one day come to light to put to bed any lingering doubts about the historical nature and accuracy of the book.