Jewish Not Judean: The Diaspora in the Book of Esther

The text discusses the requirement of Israelites to free their Hebrew slaves:

^{ירמיה לד:ט} לְשַׁלַּח אִישׁ אֶת עַבְדּוֹ וְאִישׁ אֶת שִׁפְחָתוֹ הָעִבְרִי וְהָעִבְרִיָּה חָפְשִׁים לְבִלְתִּי עֲבָד בָּם בִּיהוּדִי אָחִיהוּ אִישׁ.

^{Jer 34:9} That everyone should set free his Hebrew slaves, both male and female, and that no one should keep his fellow Judean enslaved. 

Here a Hebrew and Judean are coterminous. The former is the standard term for Israelite slaves in the biblical law collections (Exod 21:2, Deut 15:12), and the latter seems to be in place of “Israelite,” the common term in the Bible for discussing the shared identity of all the tribes. (The word Yehudi does appear four times in Jeremiah 36, but there it is a personal name [Yehudi son of Netanyahu], so not relevant to our discussion.)

The passage here discusses gentiles who wish to join the Yehudim, or support them in some way:

^{זכריה ח:כג} כֹּה אָמַר יְ־הוָה צְבָאוֹת בַּיָּמִים הָהֵמָּה אֲשֶׁר יַחֲזִיקוּ עֲשָׂרָה אֲנָשִׁים מִכֹּל לְשֹׁנוֹת הַגּוֹיִם וְהֶחֱזִיקוּ בִּכְנַף אִישׁ יְהוּדִי לֵאמֹר נֵלְכָה עִמָּכֶם כִּי שָׁמַעְנוּ אֱלֹהִים עִמָּכֶם.

^{Zech 8:23} Thus said YHWH of Hosts: In those days, ten men from nations of every tongue will take hold—they will take hold of every Jew by a corner of his cloak and say, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”

Robert Alter (The Hebrew Bible A Translation with Commentary [New York: WW Norton, 2018]) writes in his gloss on this verse:

Yehudi is palpably moving toward the meaning of “Jew” because it is now hard to speak of a “Judahite” (Hebrew, ben yehudah), given that the kingdom of Judah no longer exists, having been replaced by the Persian province of Yehud.

This is not the only, or even the most common way to express “from the tribe of Judah” in the Bible. The term בני יהודה, “sons of Judah,” appears 51 times in the Bible, but never in Esther; the term איש יהודה “the Judahite people” appears 31 times, also never in Esther, and the alternative form of this term, אנשי יהודה “people of Judah” appears 3 times, also not in Esther. This fits with the argument above that the book of Esther is trying to communicate something other than “from the tribe of Judah” with Yehudi/Yehudim and thus avoids terms that imply tribal affiliation.

Indeed, this is taken for granted in the story of Zelophechad’s daughters, when the Manassite men complain that if these women inherit land and then marry outside the tribe, the land will then become part of another tribe (Num 36).

The Talmud then offers the inverse view, that the tribes competed over who doesn’t have to include him:

רבא אמר כנסת ישראל אמרה לאידך גיסא ראו מה עשה לי יהודי ומה שילם לי ימיני מה עשה לי יהודי דלא קטליה דוד לשמעי דאתיליד מיניה מרדכי דמיקני ביה המן ומה שילם לי ימיני דלא קטליה שאול לאגג דאתיליד מיניה המן דמצער לישראל

Rava said: “The Assembly of Israel made this argument in the opposite direction: ‘Look what this Judahite did to me and what this Benjaminite paid me with.’ What this Judahite did to me: Since David did not kill Shimei, and Mordechai was descended from him, of whom Haman was jealous. And what this Benjaminite paid me with: For Saul did not kill Agag, from whom Haman was born, who causes suffering to Israel.”

This is an unusually negative perspective on Mordechai.

The midrash ignores the end of the story, in which David tells Solomon to avenge him against Shimei and figure out a way to kill him (1 Kgs 2:8–9), which Solomon does (1 Kgs 2:36–46). Ostensibly, the midrash assumes that the relevant son of Shimei was born sometime between his cursing David and Solomon’s executing him.  

The midrash opens with:

יהודי למה נקרא שמו יהודי, והלא ימיני הוא? לפי שייחד שמו של הקדוש ברוך הוא כנגד כל באי עולם, הה"ד (אסתר ג:ב) "לא יכרע ולא ישתחוה."

Yehudi—Why was he referred to as a Yehudi? Was he not a Benjamite? It is because he unified (yiched) the name of the Holy One before all the world, as it is written (Esth 3:2): “He would not kneel or bow.”

The midrash then offers an alternative version of the same midrashic answer:

ויש אומרים שהיה שקול כאברהם בדורו: מה אברהם אבינו מסר את עצמו לתוך כבשן האש והחזיר והכיר לבריות גדולתו של הקדוש ברוך הוא, הה"ד (בראשית י"ב) ואת הנפש אשר עשו בחרן, אף מרדכי בימיו הכירו הבריות גדולתו של הקדוש ברוך הוא, הה"ד ורבים מעמי הארץ מתיהדים, וייחד שמו של הקדוש ברוך הוא וקדשו, ולפיכך נקרא יהודי, דכתיב "איש יהודי"—אל תקרי "יהודי" אלא "יחידי".

And there are those who say that he was the equal of Abraham in his generation. Just as our father Abraham allowed himself to be thrown into the fiery furnace and thus brought many of his fellow creatures to recognize the Holy One—as it says (Gen 12:5) “and the souls that they made in Haran”—so too in Mordechai’s day, people [were led] to recognize the Holy One—as it says (Esth 8:17) “and many of the peoples became Yehudim”—and he unified the name of the Holy One and sanctified it. Therefore, he is called Yehudi, as it says “a Yehudi man”—don’t read “Yehudi,” rather “Yechidi” (unique one).

See, Yehudit Henshke, “Gutturals in MS Cambridge of the Mishnah: A Historical-Linguistic Study of Rabbinic Hebrew Traditions,” Hebrew Studies 52 (2011): 171–200. For another example of such a midrash, see Rabbi Josiah’s interpretation of ופסחתי as ופסעתי in Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael Pascha §7.

The may be what the Rabbis were trying to communicate when they say that at a certain point in history, even if a person knew their tribal affiliation, they would still identify as Yehudi (Genesis Rabbah 98:6):

אין אדם אומר ראובני אנא שמעוני אנא אלא יהודי אנא.

A person would not say “I am a Reubenite,” “I am a Simeonite,” but “I am a Judahite (or “Judean”).”

Another example of Yehudi as Judahite/Judean comes from Jeremiah’s description of those who escaped the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem:

^{ירמיה מ:יב} וַיָּשֻׁבוּ כָל הַיְּהוּדִים מִכָּל הַמְּקֹמוֹת אֲשֶׁר נִדְּחוּ שָׁם וַיָּבֹאוּ אֶרֶץ יְהוּדָה אֶל גְּדַלְיָהוּ הַמִּצְפָּתָה וַיַּאַסְפוּ יַיִן וָקַיִץ הַרְבֵּה מְאֹד.

^{Jer 40:12} All these Yehudim returned from all the places to which they had scattered. They came to the land of Judah, to Gedaliah at Mizpah, and they gathered large quantities of wine and figs.

Here again we are speaking of Judeans who escaped Judah and then returned when Gedaliah took charge.

The idea of ʿam as a reference to a people not connected to a home territory can already be seen in Exodus 1:9, when the King of Egypt refers to the Israelites as עַם בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל “the people/nation of the children of Israel.”

The question of when Jews and Judaism became a conceptual category is heavily debated among Second Temple Judaism experts and is especially relevant for many Hellenistic Jewish texts from apocryphal works to the New Testament. For some discussion of the issues, see Daniel R. Schwartz, Judeans and Jews: Four Faces of Dichotomy in Ancient Jewish History (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2014); Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties, Hellenistic Culture and Society (University of California Press, 2001); Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E., Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), part 1. The online-journal, Marginalia, ran a symposium on the question with ten scholars debating the different arguments for various translations. See “Jew and Judean: A Forum on Politics and Historiography in the Translation of Ancient Texts,” Marginalia (Aug 26, 2014). Here I am limiting my discussion to the meaning of the term in the book of Esther. 

I follow Robert Alter here, who renders dat as “rules” and suggests that they may be either ethnic practices or religious regimen. If these are cultural practices rather than the law of the land, the Yehudim needn’t be seen as scofflaws.  Haman’s accusation of disloyalty may be more innuendo than explicit.

In modern Hebrew, the term means “religion.” For a discussion of this term and its history, see Abraham Melamed, דת: מחוק לאמונה: קורותיו של מינוח מכונן [Dat, From Law to Religion: A History of a Formative Term] (Kibbutz HaMeuchad, 2014). While Melamed sees dat coming to mean something akin to religion much later, I suggest that it takes on this meaning already in rabbinic literature. The Talmud (b. Sukkah 56b) speaks of a woman שהמירה דתה, “who changed her dat.”  In the parallel in the Tosefta (Sukkah 4:28) this phrase reads נשתמדה “she apostasized,” after which she proceeded to marry a non-Jew. This implies that the Talmud also is speaking of someone who changed her religion.

Ahasuerus has rules about drinking at his party (Esth 1:8) and the decree against Vashti includes a rule about husbands being allowed to control what language is spoken in his home (Esth 1:22).

What this would have entailed during this period is unclear. See some discussion in, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “In the Torah, Is the Ger Ever a Convert?” TheTorah (2019).

This latter option is preferred by NJPS, but originates, as far as I can tell, in the commentary of R. Elijah of Vilna (1766–1808):

שעשו עצמן כיהודים אבל באמת אינם יהודים גמורים.

They acted as if they were Jews but in truth they weren’t really Jews.  

This was also Ehrlich’s preferred reading: “mityahadim doesn’t mean ‘became Jews’ rather it is more like: ‘acted as if they were Jews.’” (מתיהדים heisst nicht “wurden Juden”, sondern ist so viel wie: gaben sich aus für Juden.) See Arnold Ehrlich, Randglossen zur Hebräischen Bibel: Textkritisches, Sprachliches, und Sachliches [Marginal Notes on the Hebrew Bible: Textual, Linguistic, and Factual] (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1914), 7.122. As Joüon and Muraoka note, the reflexive hitpaʿel form (used here in מִתְיַהֲדִים), “sometimes has the ‘simulating’ nuance of to disguise oneself as or to show oneself (truly or falsely) to be such and such.” Some other examples are Amnon pretending to be ill to get Tamar to minister to him (2 Sam 13:5–6), or David pretending to be insane to fool the Philistines (1 Sam 21:14). See Paul L. Joüon and Takamitsu Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, 2^nd ed., repr. with corr.; (Rome: Editrice Pontifico Instituto Biblico, 2009), 147–148 [§53i].

Whether the people of the land actually became Jews or merely pretended to become Jews, the text presupposes the possibility of a non-Jew becoming a Jew.  The ability to take on a Jewish identity colors this attribute more as religio-cultural than tribal or geographic ancestry.  Unlike the book of Daniel, which notes that Jews have a ritually restricted diet, refuse to worship idols, and pray daily, the book of Esther never clarifies what “rules” the Jews follow exactly.

In his “Judea versus Judaism: Between 1 and 2 Maccabees” (TheTorah 2021), Daniel Schwartz, Professor of Judaic Studies at Hebrew University, argues that one of the key differences between the First and Second books of Maccabees is that the former is Judean and the latter diaspora. As such, he argues, 1 Maccabees is primarily interested in Judean national politics while 2 Maccabees is focused more on Jewish religion. This is a natural distinction given that the authors of the former book were part of a Judean polity, while the latter authors lived outside this polity, and had to think about their position as Jews in Ptolemaic Egypt. I argue that we can see the same type of thinking in the book of Esther.

For example, when Abraham sends his servant to get a wife for Isaac, he tells him to go to his moledet (Gen 24:4), i.e., the place where he grew up, which is why the man travels to Haran.

The NETS translation renders the term “my lineage,” but this is an unusual translation and may have been motivated by the problems discussed above, that make “homeland” fit badly in context.

For more on parallelism in biblical poetry, see James L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Adele Berlin, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism, rev. and exp. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008 [orig. 1985]); Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, rev. and updated ed. (New York: Basic, 2011 [orig. 1985]).

In his second commentary, ibn Ezra goes further and makes it an almost exact parallel to the term עם (“people/nation”):

את עמי – הזכרים, ומולדתי – הנקבות, על כן כתוב באבדן בלשון נקבות.

“My people”—the males; “and my moledet”—the females. This is why the term באבדן (with the loss of) is written in the grammatical feminine.

Understanding the parallelism between moledet and ʿam here helps us translate the other mention of moledet in the book of Esther, which appears twice:

^{אסתר ב:י} לֹא הִגִּידָה אֶסְתֵּר אֶת עַמָּהּ וְאֶת מוֹלַדְתָּהּ...

^{Esth 2:10} Esther did not reveal her moledet or her people…

^{אסתר ב:כ} אֵין אֶסְתֵּר מַגֶּדֶת מוֹלַדְתָּהּ וְאֶת עַמָּהּ...

^{Esth 2:20} Esther would not reveal her moledet or her people…

In line with the point made above, this doesn’t mean she did not reveal her homeland of Judea, but the two terms are a hendiadys, a word pair in which both of the same meaning, and therefore, should be translated as “her kindred and her people” as indeed KJV, NJPS, and NRSV do.

I am grateful to the editors for calling my attention to several pertinent references and for their other useful suggestions.