by David Plotz
Chapter 4
This chapter contains the Bible’s finest tribute to family and love. Koheleth begins by deploring the “solitary individuals,” who spend all their time working but have no one to share their wealth with. This flows into the following glorious passage:
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone?
Chapters 5–6
Koheleth concludes that wealth and greed bring only dissatisfaction. “A lover of money never has his fill of money.” It’s also pointless to love money, because you can’t take it with you. Ripping off Job—or being ripped off by Job—he declares: “As he came out of his mother’s womb, so must he depart at last, naked as he came.” (Job 1 says: “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there.”)
Chapter 9
I now understand why Ecclesiastes is the favorite book of the Bible among people who don’t strongly believe in God. It offers the only genuine competition to the Bible’s main theme of heaven, redemption, and judgment. If you believe in God, you can explain injustice and wickedness on earth with Judgment Day, when the good get their just deserts. But what if you don’t believe? What if death is just death? What if there is no afterlife, no second chance? How do we live then? Ecclesiastes faces this head-on. Koheleth believes that you die and that’s it—“even a live dog is better than a dead lion…the dead know nothing…their loves, their hates, their jealousies have long since perished.” Koheleth’s answer is: seize the day. “Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might.” “Enjoy happiness with a woman you love.” This is all we get, so make the most of it.
I am not criticizing one bit when I say that this is a godless philosophy. It is literally a way to live well without God. So, it raises an obvious question: what on Earth is it doing in the Bible? Why did the rabbis and bishops keep Ecclesiastes all these thousands of years? I can think of a couple of reasons. First, there may be a powerful agnostic strain in the Judeo-Christian tradition—hey, that’s certainly my strain—and Ecclesiastes is a way to speak to this crowd, a way to acknowledge their doubts but keep them in the fold. (A few weeks ago, an evangelical Christian friend told me that Ecclesiastes is his favorite book of the Bible. This makes me like him even more, but I wonder if his pastor should worry about him.) Second, maybe Ecclesiastes was kept in the Bible precisely because it’s so provocative. It riles people up, it makes them think, and thinking may make them more active in their faith.
Chapter 12
The last chapter is a beauty. Returning to our key lesson—repeat after me, class, Enjoy your days under the sun, because they are brief—Koheleth delivers a poetic montage, a list of people, places, and things coming to their end. It has a relentless, gorgeous rhythm. It sounds exactly like a Bob Dylan song:
When the guards of the house become shaky,
And the men of valor are bent,
And the maids that grind, grown few, are idle,
And the ladies that peer through the windows grow dim,
And the doors to the street are shut—
With the noise of the hand mill growing fainter,
And the song of the bird growing feebler,
And all the strains of music dying down;
When one is afraid of heights
And there is terror in the road…
Before the silver cord snaps
And the golden bowl crashes,
The jar is shattered at the spring,
And the jug is smashed at the cistern.
And the dust returns to the ground,
As it was.
So live now! Live now, before it’s too late!
That should be the end of Ecclesiastes, but it’s not. There’s a hilariously misplaced coda, seemingly tacked on by another author trying to make the book more palatable. It declares: “The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: Revere God and observe His commandments…. God will call every creature to account for everything unknown, be it good or bad.”
Uh, dude, did you read the rest of the book? That’s exactly what it doesn’t say.
TWENTY-THREE
The Book of Esther
The First Miss Universe Pageant
In which the King of Persia divorces his wife, holds a beauty pageant, and marries the winner, a nice Jewish girl named Esther; her uncle saves the king’s life; the new prime minister, Haman, hates Jews and orders their extermination; Esther and her uncle discover the plan and persuade the king that it’s a bad idea; Haman is executed, his supporters are crushed, and the Jewish victory is celebrated with the holiday Purim.
CHAPTER 1
Esther is one of the best stories in the Bible, but not because it teaches moral lessons, reveals human goodness, or glorifies the Lord. It’s short on all three counts. Instead, it’s a great story because it’s got sex, subterfuge, violence, revenge, and four main characters straight out of Shakespeare.
We begin with a jerk. Not merely a jerk, but a vain, egomaniacal, fickle, childish cad. Ahasuerus is emperor of, well, everywhere. Based in Persia, he rules 127 provinces from India to Ethiopia. Notably for our purposes, he rules the Jews, who have been liberated from their Babylonian oppressors and now live throughout the Persian empire.
Soon after he inherits the throne, Ahasuerus decides to hold a six-month party in his capital, Shushan. The final week of Ahasuerus’s party is a banquet, where, as during Mardi Gras and at the Sigma Chi house, “the rule for drinking was, ‘no restrictions.’” On the seventh day of the feast, the soused king orders his queen, Vashti, to come and “display her beauty to the partygoers.”
What does “display her beauty” mean, you ask? Good question. I don’t know. Does he want her merely to be admired from afar? Or lasciviously ogled? Or does he actually expect her to strip for them? It’s not clear, and we never learn the answer, because Vashti bravely refuses. Ahasuerus flips out. His ministers tell him that Vashti has not merely insulted her hubby but committed a crime against the empire, because now all women will think it’s OK to disobey their husbands, and what a mess that will be. “There will be no end of scorn and provocation!”
Egged on by the prime minister, the king orders Vashti banished from his presence. He concludes, hilariously, that their divorce will improve marriages nationwide: From now on, “all wives will treat their husbands with respect.” So ends our setup, one of the most entertaining chapters in the whole Good Book.
CHAPTER 2
Playing the role of royal pimps, Ahasuerus’s ministers assemble all the beautiful young virgins in the empire, placing them under the care of the emperor’s top eunuch. (This episode includes a fabulous line, one that reminds us just how little has changed in 2,500 years. The ministers instruct the eunuch to treat the girls right: “Let them be provided with their cosmetics.”) When the virgins arrive at the harem, they don’t go immediately to Ahasuerus’s bed. Rather, they prepare for an entire year: “Six months with oil of myrrh and six months with perfumes and women’s cosmetics.”
It’s the first Miss Universe pageant, complete with a tiara for the winner. (Plus one sleazy Persian monarch in the role of Donald Trump.) And your new Miss Universe, 483 BC, is—Miss Shushan, Esther Cohen! Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me that Esther turns out to be the most stunning girl in the empire. Not to reveal my biases, but have you seen how great-looking the Jewish women of that region are? Readers, I married one.
The emperor makes Esther his queen. A Jewish orphan, Esther had been adopted by her elderly cousin Mordecai. At Mordecai’s urging, Esther “passes,” not revealing herself as a Jew to her husband.
Loitering outside the palace gates one day, Mordecai overhears two eunuchs plotting to assassinate Ahasuerus. (And who can blame them? If someone made you a eunuch, wouldn’t you want some payback?) He tells Esther, who reports it
to her husband, who has the plotters impaled on stakes.
CHAPTER 3
The king appoints a new prime minister, Haman. (Boo! Hiss!) Everyone else in the court bows to Haman, but Mordecai refuses. The text doesn’t say this, but I assume that Mordecai won’t bow because Jews are supposed to bow only to God. Is that right? (Question: If that is the case, how does Mordecai get away with not bowing to the king?) The detestable Haman is “filled with rage” at Mordecai and plots to annihilate all the Jews in the empire. Haman casts lots to determine the date of the massacre. (“Lots” is purim in Hebrew; this is why the holiday inspired by Esther is called Purim.) Now Haman needs to get the king on his side. Haman tells Ahasuerus that the empire is filled with Jews who don’t obey the king’s laws but follow their own laws instead. The king mustn’t tolerate such dissent.
What’s curious is that Haman is half right. From Persia to Spain to the United States, we Jews have always set ourselves apart from the societies in which we live, following our own customs and laws (though also the laws of the host nation). That separation has allowed Jews to maintain their faith and culture through 2,500 years of diaspora. The question, of course, is what conclusion you should draw from the separation. In many places, wise rulers decided that Jewish separation posed no danger, because Jews contributed so much to the nation. But in other places, rulers exploited Jewish separateness as a threat and an opportunity. Jews could be scapegoated and attacked, and their difference was considered a menace to what should be a homogeneous society. (See Spain during the Inquisition, or Nazi Germany.) So the story of Esther is also a lesson in the virtue of diversity.
The king, an easily led fool, listens to Haman for about fifteen seconds and agrees that extermination of the Jews is a great idea. (Then, presumably, he immediately goes back to what really interests him—playing video golf or fondling the latest batch of virgins.)
Haman dispatches an order across the empire, under the king’s signature, to “destroy, massacre, and exterminate all the Jews, young and old, children and women, on a single day.” Those three verbs—“destroy, massacre, and exterminate”—are very powerful, emphasizing the existential menace of Haman. Remember that at this time there were no Jews anywhere else in the world. If you wiped out the Jews in the Persian empire, you wiped them out, period. It’s not hyper-bole to compare Hitler to Haman or Haman to Hitler.
Here’s a fascinating verse. When the decree is announced in Shushan, the king and Haman sit down for a celebratory dinner, but “the city of Shushan [is] dumfounded.” Presumably, this is because Shushan itself has a huge Jewish population. It must be the New York of Persia.
CHAPTERS 4-6
Jews grieve over their impending destruction, slated for the thirteenth day of the month of Adar. But they don’t revolt. Why?
Mordecai asks Esther to intercede with the king. She quavers. She tells Mordecai that Ahasuerus has not seen her in a month, and she can’t go to him on her own, because the penalty for seeing the king without having been summoned is death. Mordecai tells her she’s going to die anyway if Haman isn’t stopped—her position won’t protect her—so she must petition Ahasuerus. She asks the Jews of Shushan to fast on her behalf, then agrees to take her life in her hands and visit the king unbidden. (Note the parallel between Vashti and Esther. Vashti risks her life by refusing to go to the king when summoned. Esther risks hers by going to the king when she has not been summoned.)
Esther shows up in the throne room. Ahasuerus, rather than chopping off her head, is thrilled to see her—she’s a stone-cold Persian fox, after all—and says she can have whatever she wants, even half the kingdom. She asks only that the king invite Haman to a feast. At the dinner, she requests that Haman and the king return for another banquet the next day. Haman is delighted at the royal favor, until he runs into Mordecai, who again refuses to bow. Haman goes home in a sour mood and tells his wife that Mordecai is spoiling his good time. His wife and friends, who just want to cheer up gloomy old Haman, tell him to erect a stake seventy-five feet high and have Mordecai impaled on it the next day. “Then you can go gaily with the king to the feast.” This puts a spring in Haman’s step and a smile in his heart.
That same night, the king has a hard time falling asleep, so he asks his servants to read to him from “the annals”: the history book–Congressional Record–New York Times where all important imperial events are recorded. His reader opens the book to the story of Mordecai averting the eunuchs’ assassination plot. The king is dismayed to hear that Mordecai has never received a reward for his good deed. Haman happens to arrive at the palace at this moment to get a bright and early start on the impaling. The king summons Haman and asks him the best way a king can honor a man. In a wonderful case of mistaken identity, Haman assumes that Ahasuerus wants to honor him and says that the king should put that man in royal robes and crown, and parade him through town on a horse. The king then orders Haman to do this—for Mordecai. Haman gulps, but does it.
CHAPTERS 7-8
Esther holds her second feast for Haman and the king. Ahasuerus again asks what he can do for her. This time she pleads for her life and the lives of her fellow Jews, who are scheduled for extermination. The king—who is either amnesiac or criminally inattentive or a moron—doesn’t seem to remember that he himself ordered the slaughter of the Jews, since he exclaims indignantly, “Who is he and where is he who dared to do this?” Esther replies—and you can imagine her pointing her bejeweled finger—“The adversary and the enemy…is this evil Haman.” Haman cringes in terror. The king storms out of the room. Haman begs Esther to save him. In a marvelous moment—again, so cinematic!—Haman lies next to Esther on her couch and pleads for his life. At this moment, the king returns to the room and assumes that Haman is trying to rape Esther. “Does he mean…to ravish the queen in my own palace?”
It’s curtains for Haman, as you can imagine. They impale him on the stake meant for Mordecai. The king gives all of Haman’s property to Esther, who hands it over to Mordecai. The king names Mordecai as his new prime minister. With the king’s OK, Mordecai sends out a new order telling the Jews that they can defend themselves if they are attacked. All of Shushan celebrates the reprieve.
If it ended there, the story of Esther would be a perfect set piece, with unambiguous moral clarity. But it doesn’t. The first dark hints come in the last verse of Chapter 8, which says that many Persians now “professed to be Jews, for the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them.”
CHAPTERS 9-10
On the day Haman scheduled for the Jewish extermination, the thirteenth of Adar, Jews muster throughout the empire and slaughter 75,000 people in a one-day spasm. The book is slippery: it never tells us whether the Hamanites actually attacked the Jews. As the last verse of Esther 8 hints, the enemies seem to have been thoroughly cowed by Mordecai’s new power, suggesting that the Jews were taking vengeance against an already defeated foe. Given that the book doesn’t report any Jewish casualties, it’s pretty clear the fight was one-sided.
It gets worse. After the first day, Ahasuerus comes to Esther and tells her that 500 people have been killed in Shushan alone. He asks her what she wants now. The bloodthirsty queen says it’s not enough. The Jews of Shushan must be given a second day to kill. Moreover, she wants all of Haman’s ten sons impaled on stakes. The king says OK, and the massacre continues. The day after the murders, the Jews celebrate “with feasting and merrymaking,” and Purim is declared a Jewish holiday for all time.
I’m from a family of lax Jews, and I’m sure our Purim celebrations weren’t quite up to code. Even so, I am shocked at the difference between the Purim story I heard in synagogue and the Purim story in the Bible. At the synagogue, we certainly celebrated the death of Haman, but I don’t recall hearing about the orgy of violence that followed. The 75,000 killed, Esther’s insistence on a second day of slaughter, the vindictive impaling of Haman’s sons—all that was underplayed or ignored in the kid-friendly Purim story I was raised on. Those horrifying acts m
ake Purim a much more ambiguous, and troubling, holiday.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Book of Daniel
Nice Pussycat!
In which Jewish Daniel is brought with three friends to the court of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, then rises to power by interpreting the king’s dreams; his friends are tossed into a furnace for refusing to bow down to a statue, but they survive; Nebuchadnezzar goes crazy, then regains his sanity by worshipping God; his faithless heir is warned by a ghostly hand; the Persians conquer Babylon and make Daniel minister; he is framed for a crime and tossed into the lions’ den, which he survives; then he has many apocalyptic visions.
There are disappointingly few lions in Daniel, and they’re bit players. Daniel is instead a version of Joseph’s story: a holy man is held against his will in a hostile land, keeps his faith, loves God, and rises to power by interpreting dreams. Like Joseph, Daniel is about how people of faith are supposed to survive, and even prosper, in an alien land. It’s about how Jews maintain their Jewish identity when society wants to erase it, and how they find strength in small groups. In short, Daniel is a manual for surviving a diaspora, and this must be why it has remained so popular for so long. It also helps that it’s a thrilling story.
CHAPTER 1
Having conquered Jerusalem and exiled the Jews, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon invites a few of the best young Jewish men to live at his court and learn Babylonian ways. Presumably they’ll serve as his ambassadors to the Jews, helping him co-opt and integrate them. This tactic is straight out of Conquering 101: it’s what all smart imperial powers do. The English enrolled Indian rajas at their boarding schools; the United States sent young Native Americans to learn the “white man’s way” at government academies. King Nebuchadnezzar’s first class of young Hebrews includes Daniel and three of Daniel’s friends: Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah—soon renamed, in Babylonian, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.