In honor of Purim, which begins tomorrow evening, The Raspberry Patch is taking a break from politics and such to return, perhaps one last time in this substack space, to Judaica. Permissions note: An essay with this title was published in Conservative Judaism, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Fall 2013). That magazine is defunct; its replacement, beginning last year, is called Masorti. I have permission from the Rabbinical Assembly, specifically from Rabbi Mordechai Rackover, the RA’s current director of publications, to re-use this now decade-plus-old essay in The Raspberry Patch, for which I am most grateful. This current version of the essay is an improvement of the original.
Finally by way of introduction, this post will naturally appeal more to Jews, and particularly to Jewishly-educated Jews, than it will to others. Understanding this essay will come most easily to those already familiar with the two narratives being compared, and particularly for those familiar with the original Hebrew texts. But since the Scroll of Esther is also part of the Christian bible it may be of interest to bible-interested Christians, as well. It is also classical world literature apart from being in the Bible, as is the story of Joseph from the book of Genesis. Since literature is in general a font of wisdom about human nature and the human condition writ large, even devoutly secular-minded readers may take an interest in some of its comments. There is very little “insider” knowledge implanted in the text and I have not delved into linguistic parallels that would require a knowledge of Hebrew to understand, and that would require use of Hebrew script even to present. The text is thus accessible, I promise, to anyone with an interest arising from whatever source.
During a pre-Purim meditation some years ago it dawned on me that there are several parallels between the story in the Scroll of Esther and the story of Joseph as laid out in Genesis. It’s hard to say how long this observation had been marinating in my brain, but suddenly that year, about a decade ago, it leaped forth nearly fully formed into consciousness (no, I was totally sober, so don’t be thinking in terms of ad lo yada.)
Ten narrative parallels between the two biblical texts seem obvious to me. Some are strong parallels, others less so; some, I later learned, have been noted over many years, as have several striking linguistic parallels (not discussed here), leading some observers to the reasonable conclusion that whoever wrote Megillat Esther consciously modeled aspects of it after the Joseph-in-Egypt story.1 I agree, and some of the parallels discussed below that are my discoveries strengthen that conclusion. In that spirit, I end with a modern midrash, just for fun.
First parallel: The protagonists in both narratives are away from home, and they are away from home involuntarily. Joseph is stolen away from Eretz Yisrael, sold by his jealous brothers to a caravan of traders headed down into Egypt. Mordechai is descended from the captives of Nebuchadnezzar; he is identified as being from the tribe of Benjamin: “the son of Yair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish, a Benjamite who had been carried away from Jerusalem with the captives that had been carried away with King Jeconiah” by Nebuchadnezzar, in 597 B.C.E. (Esther 2:5-6). That means, according to the most plausible reading, that he was a child of the fourth generation removed from the beginning of the Babylonian exile. 2
Second parallel: The protagonists in both cases are “sold” into slavery. This term is used regarding Joseph in Genesis (37:37, makh’ru); in Esther 7:4 we read: “for we are sold (nimkarnu), I and my people, to be destroyed.” It is the same root (m-kh-r) in Hebrew, and in no other passage in the Hebrew Bible is a major figure “sold” or described with that language.
Third parallel: Both Joseph and Esther are propelled along in their stories because they are physically attractive. This gets Joseph into trouble because he declines Potiphar’s wife’s repeated advances; but had he never been tossed into prison, the rest of the story could not have happened as it did. Esther’s beauty results in her being chosen as queen. Aside from the story of Samson and perhaps Jacob’s love for Rachel, there are no other cases in Scripture where physical attractiveness plays such a significant role in the unfolding of a story. In Samson’s case it is a distracting and unimportant aspect of the story; in Rachel’s case, too, it hardly figures at all in the ensuing narrative. But in the cases of Joseph and Esther, the narrative unfolds as it does precisely because of the physical attributes of the protagonists.
Fourth parallel: Both Jacob’s family, led by Joseph, and the Jews of Persia, led by Mordechai and Esther, have a chance at the end of their respective stories to leave exile and return to the land of Israel, but they do not do so. In the case of Joseph, we know from the text that a seven-year famine was in process, five years of which were left at the time of the story. Joseph was 44 when the famine ended and 110 when he died, so there was plenty of time for him to have returned to Israel had he so desired. Indeed, he did return very temporarily—to bury his father Jacob—but he then turned around and went back to Egypt. At the end of Esther’s story, the triumphant Jews could also have chosen to return to the land of Israel had they wanted to. The timing would have been at least mildly propitious. 3 But they did not; there is not so much as even a proto-Zionist hint in Megillat Esther. 4 In any event, in both cases—Egypt and Shushan—many of our ancestors decided to stay in more cosmopolitan, prosperous, and seemingly secure urban environments that return to Eretz Yisrael.
Fifth parallel: At a certain relatively early point in the narrative, both protagonists obtain portentous confidential information. Joseph has inside knowledge about Pharaoh’s head butler and baker; Mordechai uncovers a plot hatched by at least two of the king’s servants. The parallel is not exact: In the story of Joseph, only one of the men is found guilty and hanged while the other is exonerated; in the Purim story, both are found guilty and are hanged. Joseph’s knowledge of the plot came to him through a dream; in the case of Mordechai we are not told how he comes upon the hidden knowledge (2:22-23). But this narrative device, or motif, of somehow receiving and passing on strategic information that leads to the hanging of those who threaten the king’s life, is unique in the Hebrew Bible to the stories of Joseph and Esther.
Sixth parallel: both protagonists hide their identity—Joseph, from his brothers; Esther, from the other women and the king—and then both reveal it at a strategic moment. They do so for the same reason: to save their people from destruction. Both Joseph and Mordechai are explicit about this. Joseph tries to comfort his brothers by saying to them that whey they did was part of God’s plan, for Joseph was placed in a position to save the family from death in the famine. Mordechai tells a hesitant Esther that she must go before the king because, for all she knows, she has come to her place for just this purpose. Esther may be unsure about this, but the reader is left in no doubt by the narrative flow that this is indeed the case.
Seventh parallel: Both stories make use of a domesticated transport animal as a prop for humiliation and rage. Benjamin’s sack, carried by his donkey, is where Joseph’s goblet is hidden—the ruse designed by Joseph to get leverage on his brothers and prevent them from leaving before he could reveal his identity to them. Judah and his brothers (except Benjamin, I imagine, for a reason noted below) are humiliated by this turn of events and made deeply afraid. A horse, of course, is involved in Haman’s humiliation.
When the king can’t sleep one night and asks to be read the chronicles of his kingdom, he learns of Mordechai’s service in revealing the plot of the two chamberlains, and learns as well that nothing has been done to reward Mordechai. Just as the exonerated butler forgot Joseph as he left prison, so no one remembered to tell the king about Mordechai’s service to the court—yet another parallel. The king knows that Haman is in the court and he asks him for advice about what to do for a person whom the king wishes to honor. Haman, thinking the king means him, waxes eloquent and lavish, but is then instructed to carry out his plan for Mordechai the Jew. So Haman dresses Mordechai in the king’s robes and parades him through the streets on the king’s horse. (This description is very similar to and, indeed, uses virtually the same sequence of verbs as in the description of the honor Pharaoh accords to Joseph after he interprets Pharaoh’s dreams.) When Haman’s wife Zeresh hears about this, her reaction is similar to that of Benjamin’s brothers at the discovery of the goblet, as in, “Oh boy, big trouble.”
Eighth parallel: Both narratives have a common concluding motif, in that the size of the government grows. Joseph increases the size of the state for Pharaoh, first purchasing cattle for grain and then land for grain in the course of the famine; Ahashverosh levies a tax on the land, growing the royal coffers and thus the grip of the state over its empire.
A ninth parallel, one no other commentator seems to have noticed, is particularly intriguing: Both narratives feature a repeated, or double, meeting or reception. As such, let’s look at it in more detail.
In the story of Joseph, in chapter 42 of Genesis, Benjamin, the youngest of Jacob’s children and Joseph’s only full brother, stays behind in the land of Israel with his father Jacob while his brothers go down to Egypt to buy food. When the food is eventually eaten up, the brothers plead with Jacob for permission to return to buy more; but this time, they tell him, they must bring Benjamin with them because the man in Egypt demanded it of them to prove they were not spies. Jacob relents and down to Egypt the brothers go, with Benjamin this time in tow. They meet with Joseph again to buy more food, and it is as the brothers try to leave that Joseph has his goblet planted in Benjamin’s sack.
In the story of Joseph this doubling of receptions makes sense in terms of how the story’s plot line develops. A fair bit of time intervenes between audiences; the brothers provide Jacob with an after-action report of their initial dealings in Egypt, Jacob reacts to it, and all this matters to how the reader interprets the motives of the characters in the story. A similar sequence, but one much more compressed in time, is related in Megillat Esther.
In chapter 5 of the Megillah, Esther appears before the king, who asks her what she wants. She requests that the king and Haman join her in a banquet, and so they do. At the banquet the king again asks Esther what she wants, and again Esther answers that she wants the king and Haman to come to another banquet, which she will prepare for them on the following day. There is no obvious reason for Esther to have requested a second banquet; what she told the king during that second banquet could just as easily have been relayed, it would seem, at the first one. But she chose not to do that. Why?
Some have reasoned that Esther got cold feet at that first feast; maybe, but there is no textual evidence for that interpretation. Indeed, there is a far better reason for why the sequence of events in the story turned out as they did.
In between the first banquet and the second is when the king has his bout of insomnia, reads about Mordechai’s good deed, and Haman parades Mordechai through the city in royal garb and on the king’s horse. Evidently, the king needed to be reminded about Mordechai, and about his being a Jew, in order to make a connection between Mordechai and Esther, and thus to understand the full context and meaning of Esther’s plea. At the second banquet Esther knows that the king will see the connection; had she sprung her plea at the first banquet she knew no such thing.
This seems a bit contrived compared to the textual richness with which the story of Joseph develops. But it is functionally parallel as the narrative develops in determining the fate of Haman and his wicked plan, which unfolds in chapter 7 (and it is critical to my new midrash, below).
So the king and Haman arrive at Esther’s second banquet, and once again the king asks Esther what she wants. Esther asks for he life and the lives of her people, the king expresses astonishment and anger that anyone would threaten his queen, and it is revealed that Haman is the evildoer and the people in question are the Jews. Note that at this dramatic moment, Esther does not explicitly identify the Jews as her people, but now she doesn’t need to. The king’s recent discovery of Mordechai’s service to him, and the fact that it was through Esther that Mordechai’s warning was delivered, did that for her.
No other biblical narrative features this twin reception/meeting theme, with a meeting of certain characters and then a repeat meeting of virtually the same characters after an interlude in which some noteworthy events transpire. (Moses’ repeated audiences with Pharaoh before the Exodus come to mind as a possible third example, but that falls into a different, far more austere and banquet-barren narrative category, it seems to me.)
What may be learned from this? Perhaps nothing more than the simple, yet still profound, observation that meaning is bound to contexts ripe with human intentions, not to things or to objective circumstances in any narrow way. The first time Joseph’s brothers meet with him, the significance of the situation hinges on buying food. At their second meeting with the Egyptian official, the brothers still think their encounter is all about buying food, but it isn’t. The first time Haman, the king, and Esther gather for a banquet, Haman believes he still controls the situation. At the second banquet Haman supposes at first that the underlying dynamics remain the same, but they are not the same. So perhaps the larger meaning is as follows: Do you think you can infer from patterns made up of material evidence the designs of the Creator and how God acts in the world? Better think again.
This possibility is strengthened by a tenth parallel. It is well known that Megillat Esther is the only book in the Hebrew Bible that does not mention God by name. It is less often remarked that Joseph is the only major figure in the Torah and the Prophets to whom God never speaks, nor does Joseph ever claim otherwise. God speaks to Adam and Eve; to Noah; to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; then, after Joseph, to Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and to more that a dozen judges and prophets. But He does not speak to Joseph. God speaks during the Joseph narrative only to Jacob, as he is about to go down to Egypt (chapter 46).
Of course, God is prominent in the story of Joseph in Egypt. Joseph’s successes are attributed to God, and Joseph does mention God on several occasions. But there is nothing remotely akin to prophecy in these chapters, and certainly there is no report of anything even remotely akin to a flashy miracle. What the two stories have in common, then, is the lesson that just because God is not speaking to humans and doing wondrously at any given time does not mean that He is absent from history. God is still involved, but in more subtle ways. Specifically, to return to the ninth parallel, those ways seem related to how events are sequenced, changing—indeed, sometimes reversing—the meaning of otherwise similar circumstances. Since the story of Esther comes not long before the end of prophecy, with Malachi, this seems a particularly apt theme for the times.
This may also be why the Megillah insists that the holiday be called Purim—an odd choice when you think about it, with the name introduced in a verse that seems like a blatant non sequitur from the previous verses. It is God who is the master of sequences, not some supposedly astrologically significant rock cast by a bunch of superstitious Persian ninnies. Hence the name “Purim” (in the plural, rather than the singular pur), ultimately asks the reader and listener to compare God’s ability to cast a “lot” with that of the Zoroastrian Achaemenid court.
There is yet another parallel, perhaps, but not one unique to the stories of Joseph and Esther. Things end well in both stories, sort of. They end well in the sense that the Jewish people are saved and kept alive, and their political standing in the two circumstances is strengthened. But these are not “happily ever after” tales. Joseph and his brothers are never truly reconciled, and they all remain in an exile bound for harsh enslavement. As for Mordechai, he is riding high; but what about Esther?
The only honest way to describe what she has done with her life is to prostitute herself at the highest possible level, for what turns out to be a very noble cause. But even in ancient times prostitution was prostitution; never does the text indicate that orphan Hadassah is in love with her king, or that she one day becomes a mother by him or any other man. Looking at the story from Esther’s point of view, it is rather sad. Blood lust is loud, and we hear it at high volume in chapter 9 of the Megillah. A mature appreciation of the book, however, needs to balance that noise with unstated but implied disappointments of the heart. One may then understand Esther’s famous remark, “If I perish, I perish” as tantamount to saying that, in her own estimation in that moment, her life isn’t worth very much anyway. That, it seems to me—all that— is a more compelling reason for fasting on Ta’anit Esther than simply to show solidarity with Esther’s own fasting.
I have since looked further into the commentaries for insight as to what these parallels between the stories of Joseph and Esther might mean. I have found some, notably in the Midrash, and I have found a few modern comments noting parallels. 5 But none of them encompasses all the parallels noted here, and none is entirely satisfactory, to me at least, on the level of teasing out a larger meaning.
If there is an overarching message that binds these two stories, it is, it seems to me, one that characterizes the unique mindset of the Hebrew Bible as a whole: Events—and particularly the sequence of events—have meaning and purpose as they play their parts in shaping the future. History and human life are not random, and events are not cyclical but progressive, a trajectory well described by a helix in motion. There are of course many illustrations of this general theme in the Hebrew Bible, but nowhere are the subtle dynamics of divine providence made more explicit, and rendered more beautifully, than in the stories of Joseph and Esther.
As to what other larger meanings there may be, I have but two fragmentary notions. The first concerns Benjamin.
Benjamin links the two stories. He is a key figure in the story of Joseph, being Joseph’s only full brother and the pivot of the latter’s stratagem with the other brothers. And, clearly, Mordechai is from the tribe of Benjamin. In the Midrash, Rabbi Yohanan notes that “the trials of Rachel’s children are equivalent and their greatness is equivalent”—and he brings textual support to illustrate his claim. Thus, as Joseph saved the Jewish people from famine in his time, so the Benjamites Mordechai and Esther saved the people from the hand of a latter-day Amalek in their time.
Beyond that, an obvious notion is that Benjamin symbolizes the fact that God works in history on behalf of the Jewish people whether or not they are located in the land of Israel. That doesn’t sound very novel to us, but in the ancient world, which accepted matter-of-factly the connective trilogy of people-land-god, it is an out-of-the-ordinary assertion.
The second notion concerns the goblet Joseph ordered to be put in Benjamin’s saddlebag, and here now is my promised “just for fun” modern midrash.
Recall chapter 31 of Genesis, where the Torah tells us that Rachel stole her father’s teraphim, a word usually translated as “gods” or “idols.” No reason is given for Rachel’s act, but to even begin to understand it one has to know the importance of unalienable ancestral land and the spirits of the dead resident on that land in virtually all ancient cultures. This dovetails with the point made above, that Israel’s God had power universally and not just in one particular land. Anyway, Rachel’s father Laban accuses a fleeing Jacob of having stolen his stuff, meaning we suppose his daughters and grandchildren, but Laban also mentions the teraphim, which he also calls elohim, his gods. Unaware of what Rachel had done, Jacob denies the charge in full and invites Laban and his posse to search the premises. They find nothing because Rachel has hidden the loot in the saddle pillow of her camel and she refuses to budge because, she says, “the way of women” is upon her. The items are referred to in verse 37 in Jacob’s words not as elohim, (“gods”) or teraphim (“idols”), but rather as keilim, “vessels.”
So we have three words to describe the same thing, including keilim. In the ancient Near Eastern, vessels as often as not used to hold strong drink; “spirits,” not at all coincidentally, were part and parcel of idolatrous religious rituals. Speaking just for fun in a midrashic tense, as it were, I think we can speculate that these teraphim/keilim of Laban were passed on after Rachel’s death in childbirth to her children, specifically to her elder child Joseph. Joseph took the most important one everywhere he went (it may have been a vehicle for spirits that stimulated his vivid dreams, and his tactlessness in describing them to his jealous brothers)—and he had it with him when he was carried down to Egypt in that fateful caravan.
This selfsame vessel, now called a gaviah since it had been plated in silver, is the one that Joseph had planted in Benjamin’s saddlebag. And when Benjamin saw it uncovered we are told, by tradition, by Joseph’s elder son and thus Benjamin’s nephew Manasseh, he recognized exactly what it was and knew then with certainty that his brother Joseph was indeed the vizier of Egypt from whom the brothers had just departed. In short, he was goblet-smacked.
This may bear on how Joseph singles out Benjamin in the reunion scene in chapter 45, for, if my midrashic hunch is right, not only did Benjamin know what was going on, but Joseph knew that he would know—just as Esther knew the king would know at the second banquet. Now, then, look carefully at verse 12: “And your eyes see,” says Joseph to his brothers, “and the eyes of my brother Benjamin, that it is my mouth that speaks to you.” Joseph has switched to speaking Hebrew, say the commentators, arguing very plausibly that this the meaning here of the words “my mouth.” Yes, but maybe the verse also means not just that Benjamin sees that it is Joseph speaking, but that the brothers can see by the look in Benjamin’s eyes the truth of what Joseph is saying, because Benjamin already knows it. Just as in music sometimes the notes not played but still “heard” from context are the sweetest, sometimes in human relationships the words not spoken but nevertheless understood from context are the most significant.
So whatever happened to that goblet? Some Christians with imagination, I am sure, would have a grail-inflected theory about that. But suppose instead that Joseph gave it to his brother Benjamin, and suppose it was then passed down from generation to generation within the tribe of Benjamin, from Kish to Shimei to Yair until it became Mordechai’s and then, yes, Queen Esther’s. Mordechai, remember, took Esther “for his own daughter” after her parents died, and there is no mention of Mordechai having a wife or a child of his own to inherit property. I like to think that Haman saw that goblet at what turned out to be his final banquet—that vessel once belonging to Laban and stolen by Rachel, and now in the possession of Rachel’s kinswoman Esther—and that when he saw it he realized suddenly that, just as his wife Zerash had warned, an Agagite could never defeat an Israelite in a battle of right and wrong.
And so it goes, God willing: As every one of our prophets took pains to teach us, as long as Jews know the difference between right and wrong and act accordingly, God will ultimately protect a faithful people from its enemies. As we say, “The Glory of Israel does not lie” (1 Samuel 15:29). And if not, well, our long history of more than occasional laxity regarding our core covenantal obligations has a known consequence, too. Heaven forbid.
Notes
1. See Moshe Gan, “Megilat Ester b’Aspaklariat Korot Yosef b’Mitzrayim,” Tarbiz 31 (1961/62), 144-49. Gan details nine linguistic parallels that I have not repeated in this essay, for they are intelligible only to those fluent in Hebrew. His essay in turn cites two other works, one in German by L.A. Rosenthal from 1895 and one in Hebrew by Y. Kaufmann from 1956; Gan thanks Jacob Levinger for pointing them out to him. All three sources are cited in Michael Graetz, “The Passage of Time in the Book of Esther,” Proceedings of the 1995 Convention (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1994), pp. 172-87, which is where I learned of them and from which I was able to track them down.
2. Some have argued that Mordechai himself was carried away in the exile, but for logical-historical and grammatical reasons too complicated to relate here I reject this interpretation. I also reject a traditional interpretation that Kish, Shimei, and Yair were not Mordechai’s immediate male ancestors as the text says but famous ancestors from remote times; this understanding violates the plain meaning of the text, which one is supposed to avoid doing unless the text is problematic. The text is not problematic here unless one strains to make it so, as did those who insisted on making Mordechai himself from the generation of the exile and Esther the mother of Darius I, under whose auspices the Second Temple was completed and dedicated. That would make the king of the Purim story Cambyses 11, who reigned from 530 to 522 B.C.E., and no formulation or manipulation of that name gets one to the Hebrew Ahashverosh.
3. If, as already noted, Mordechai is the fourth generation removed from the Babylonian exile, and if we figure about 25-30 years per generation, that works out to about 100-125 years after 597 B.C.E. (the first of the three deportations, with King Jeconiah), or around 497-472 B.C.E. That means that the historical Mordechai, if there was one, lived after the Second Temple had been rebuilt under Persian auspices in 516/517 B.C.E. and just a generation before Ezra and Nehemiah—and before Nehemiah oversaw the building of Jerusalem’s walls (445-433 B.C.E.). That would align with the historical consensus that Ahashverosh’s identity matched the Persian monarch Khshayarsha, from which was derived the Greek name Xerxes, who ruled from 485-464 B.C.E. If so, then the story told in Megillat Esther would begin in 482 B.C.E., the third year of the king’s reign. The point of all this historical ciphering is that not only could the Jews of Shushan and surrounds have returned to Israel after their salvation to what was then a newly rebuilt Second Temple, but they would have done so within the selfsame Persian imperial security sphere and very likely have been welcomed by their countrymen in so doing.
4. This may have something to do with how Purim became ensconced as a holiday in the rabbinic calendar as that calendar was codified in the first and second centuries C.E. Unless someone discovers a rare ancient document, we are left to speculate about this, but it could be that in the formative period of rabbinic Judaism Purim acquired equal status with Hanukah, the events pertaining to which did happen in Eretz Yisrael, because of a shrewd rabbinic decision to accommodate the large, prosperous, and high-status diaspora community that had chosen still not to return from Exile. Not only in Mordechai’s time, but for centuries thereafter, large numbers of Jews lived in what is today Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin, and there were, of course, important centers of scholarship in these lands outside Eretz Yisrael. In other words, by including Purim at equal status with Hanukah, the Rabbis, who were themselves located both in and outside of the land, saw to it that the Jerusalem-centered and diaspora communities got equal treatment in terms of minor post-Torah-canonization holidays.
5. In addition to Gan, Kaufman, and Rosenthal (see note 2 above), see Rabino Joshua Kullock, “Esther and Joseph: Veiling and Unveiling”; at http://www.morim-madrichim.org/en/Content/AR/2645/esther-and-joseph-veiling-and unveiling; Gavriel Haim Cohen, “Queen Esther in the Footsteps of Joseph the Wise,” in Studies in the Five Megillot: Megillat Esther (Israel Ministry of Education and Culture, 1991); Vered Hollander-Goldfarb, “Purim: Esther and Joseph—Two Models of Exilic Jews,” accessed at www.conservativeyeshiva.org/purim-esther-and-joseph, March 15, 2012. There is also a neat little compendium of 13 parallels, found at http: apps.business.ualberta.ca/reshef/purim/joseph.html (no date). I know not who is responsible for assembling it. G.H. Cohen is best at citing precise statements from Midrash Rabbah.