Jewish Queens: From the Story of Esther to the History of Shelamzion

As shall be discussed further below, much of what we know about Shelamzion Alexandra comes from Josephus’s two accounts of her reign in Jewish War 1.107-119 and Jewish Antiquities 13.398-432. For an analysis of these sources and their reliability, see Tal Ilan, Integrating Women into Second Temple History (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), esp. 100-105 and 127-154. This devar builds on Ilan’s work: her oeuvre is well known to academics but is not as well known as it could be to the reading public.

See Ilan, Integrating women, 127, commenting on Jewish War 1.71 and Jewish Antiquities 13.302. The murdered queen’s name does not survive in the historical record.

See discussion in Ilan, “‘Daughters of Israel, Weep for Rabbi Ishmael!’: The School of Rabbi Aqiva vs. the School of Rabbi Ishmael,” Silencing the Queen: The Literary Histories of Shelamzion and Other Jewish Women (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006).

Tal Ilan devotes a chapter to discussing the name Shelamzion in Silencing the Queen, 259ff. She notes that Josephus only knew this queen by her Greek name, Alexandra, while the Rabbis only knew her by her Semitic name. However, “later scribes, as the manuscript evidence suggests, no longer understood it. There is not one correct rendering of her name in any rabbinic manuscript” (260). The spelling of her name is confirmed by its appearance in the Qumran material; see4QCalendrical Document C (Florentino Garcia Martinez and Elbert J. C. Tigchelaar, eds., Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition[Brill Academic Publishers, 2000], 694).

Ilan discusses variants of the same traditions in Silencing the Queen, 35-42, drawing attention to how later rabbinic sources gradually eliminate Shelamzion from this tradition and replace her with her contemporary Shimon ben Shetach.

Josephus writes: “Alongside Queen Alexandra, and gaining power with her, were the Pharisees, an important sector of the Jewish community who were considered more religious than the rest of the nation and stricter in the observance and interpretation of the Laws” (trans. Gaalya Cornfeld, ed.,Josephus: The Jewish War; Zondervan Publishing House, 1982).

See Elsie Stern’s reading of Megillat Esther as a cautionary tale for Jews living in the Diaspora in her TABS essay, “Megillat Esther: A Godless and Assimilated Diaspora.”   

See Helena Zlotnick’s discussion of Esther in Dinah’s Daughters: Gender and Judaism from the Hebrew Bible to Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 87.

For more on Esther’s diplomacy and its place in theMegillah and in understanding female biblical characters, see Michael Fox’s TABS essay “The Women in Esther.”

Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (Free Press, 1992), 130.

Elias J. Bickerman, “The Colophon of the Greek Book of Esther,” Journal of Biblical Literature 63.4 (1944): 339-62. Ilan relies upon Bickerman’s dating, as does Aaron Koller’sEsther in Ancient Jewish Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Others have suggested an earlier date of translation, ca. 114 BCE: see Carey Moore, “On the Origins of the LXX Additions to the Book of Esther,” JBL 92.3 (1973): 382-83.

Ilan, “Esther, Judith and Susanna as Propaganda for Shelamzion’s Queenship,” Integrating Women, 135.

The analogy of Israel to a sinful adulteress in the prophets is more prominent. See Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 126 ff.; Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 137-38. See also Susan Niditch, A Prelude to Biblical Folklore: Underdogs and Tricksters (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000).