I read a YA novel based on this story back in grade school (High school? Middle school?), but let this be a friendly reminder that the Bible is not a book intended for young adults with modern sensibilities, and those YA books are to this as Disney fairytales are to Grimms’ fairytales.

In the story, as I originally learned it, the king’s advisor Hamann slandered the Jewish people to King Ahasuerus, who agreed that they should all be killed. Meanwhile the beautiful Jewish maiden Esther married the king, begged for her people to be spared, and revealed Hamann for a slanderer at the same time. The Jewish people were spared, Hamann was cast from favor, and King Ahasuerus and Queen Esther lived happily ever after.

So, you know, aside from King Ahasuerus’ genocidal tendencies (a rather big aside, in my opinion), a relatively benign YA plot.

Of course, then we get to the source material here, and wow were there some details that were left out.

So, first of all, King Ahasuerus had cast off his original queen, Queen Vashti, because she refused to obey him when he was drunk and wanted her to strip in a public gathering so he could show off how beautiful she was. In response to her refusal, she was cast off and he had all the beautiful young virgin girls* in the land to be brought to him so that he could sleep with one each night and then keep them isolated in his house of wives ever after and never see them again.** There were a lot of girls in the running, though, because it took more than a year for the king to get to Esther.

During that year, Esther courted the favor of the king’s chamberlain who gave her preferential treatment and told her how to seduce the king in turn, such that her night with him pleased him so much that he declared her queen in Vashti’s stead.***

Meanwhile, Hamann is the king’s advisor who’s way too full of himself and decided that Esther’s uncle Mordecai**** hadn’t bowed low enough to him when they passed on the street, and thus Mordecai and all of his people should be killed. The king is apparently too taken with his stream of wives to care about things like statescraft or genocide, so essentially tells Hamann to do whatever he wants. Hamann immediately creates a proclamation that all the Jews are to be killed and their possessions stolen on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month.+

Now, there’s a whole complicated subplot going on between Mordecai and Hamann, but honestly it fits in pretty well in a YA book because it is just that type of juvenile dispute about showing the proper deference and refusing to bow down, etc, except with threats of death and genocide.

But meanwhile, Esther risks being killed for interrupting the king in order to invite the king and Hamann to a fancy dinner. She survives and the king is delighted.++ The first dinner party goes so well, that the king asks Esther what she would like as a boon? She says a second dinner party and the king is once more delighted. The second dinner party is also wonderful and the king again asks what boon he can grant her and this time she’s like, you can save my life and the lives of my people.

The king is horrified that anyone has threatened to kill Esther, his favorite wife, and her people. She directs him to Hamann as the threat.+++ Hamann begs Esther for mercy, but the king sees Hamann near Esther and thinks he’s trying to rape her and has him immediately executed on the gallows Hamann himself had prepared for executing Mordecai. It’s all very dramatic.

However, while all of these events took place in the third month, Hamann’s proclamation about the genocide scheduled for the twelfth month have already gone out. But rather than rescind that proclamation++++, King Ahasuerus was apparently the type who would have enjoyed watching The Purge movies because he makes a second proclamation saying that on the same day that the people were supposed to kill the Jewish people, the Jewish people are granted the right to gather together and kill any of their enemies and take all of their possessions. So, essentially a free-for-all of death and theft on the thirteenth of the twelfth month.

The king asked if Esther wanted anything else and she asked for a second day for the Jews to kill their enemies, plus could all of Hamann’s ten sons also be killed specifically? The king was like, okay.

So the fourteenth of the twelfth month was also a bloodbath, while the fifteenth was feasting and celebration.

And thus the annual celebration of Purim, for surviving Hamann’s plot. And Mordecai goes on to take Hamann’s place as a high counselor and everyone is all very happy.

The End.

Summary: Hamann manipulates the king into ordering the genocide of the Jewish people, but Esther manipulates the king right back into killing Hamann and allowing the Jewish people to kill their enemies.

Moral: Kings can be super easy to manipulate but you’d better be on your guard against someone else manipulating your same king?

* I can only assume that a lot of beautiful young girls heard this proclamation and had an sudden interest in having sex, pronto, with someone in their home villages.
** It’s kind of super similar to Sheherazade’s story, except without the actual death threat to the new brides. Just a single rape-night and then eternal isolation and captivity. So, there’s that.
*** This is a triumph, in case your wondering if it’s actually a good thing or a bad thing.
**** Not that anyone knows that Mordecai is Esther’s uncle, because who would care about keeping track of the relatives of that many wives.
+ I feel like there are practical problems with making a public proclamation that whole communities of people are to be slaughtered on a specific day in the future. Like, I realize it’s important for the death squads to have time to prepare, but I feel like it’s a bit much to expect the intended victims to just accept that their fate is sealed because the king said so.
++ Maybe none of his other wives invite him to spend extra time with them just because he keeps on threatening to kill them? So he’s very flattered that this beautiful woman is interested in him.
+++ Very politically stated, in my opinion, since it was the king himself who gave Hamann the right to threaten them.
++++ I’m actually not sure if it was possible for a proclamation to be rescinded. It might have been that once it was made permanent record, that was it, to avoid confusion with knowing if an official document was valid or not. It might always be valid.

Next up: Psalms

Nehemiah (the character) is introduced (at the beginning of his book even!) as an Israelite serving as the cup bearer for the king of Persia. I’m not sure how one gets to be a cup bearer for a king, but it seems like a pretty sweet position, actually, since you’re essentially part of the king’s entourage without being an advisor with responsibilities other than making sure there’s always wine for the king. Thus, the king tends to really like the cup bearer.

So Nehemiah looks sad for a couple of days, the king (Artaxerxes, aka Ar’tax-erx’-es*) asks him what’s up, and he explains that he worries about how the Israelites are doing in Jerusalem. After some questions about how long a trip there and back would take, Artaxerxes gives Nehemiah funds and permission to go over to Jerusalem and check out the situation. He inspects Jerusalem (a la undercover boss) and then inspires the workers to do more. There was a wall around the city with many gates and many people working on those gates, and they’re all named in chapter 3.

In chapter 4, however, are the neighboring city-states who are a more than a bit suspicious of the Israelite refugees fortifying their town. After some escalation, the Israelites start guarding the half-finished wall, 24-7, until it is complete

Chapter 5 is anger over taxation and whatnot. It sounds all very modern, just with unfamiliar specifics. But why should we have to pay for someone else to eat? What about our children? Is this governor better or worse than the last governor? It’s possible that the reason why I have trouble tracking this chapter is that I’m so tired of the US election arguments.

Chapter 6: The neighbors really don’t like that fortified wall.

Chapter 7: Now that the wall is built, it must now be guarded. Also, time for a census: and you’d better be able to prove your decent, because at least some people were viewed with deep suspicion for claiming to be priests but unable to prove it.***

Chapter 8: Ezra**** lectures the people about the laws, but what’s particularly interesting here is that the chapter itself doesn’t recount the laws. (thank god: Leviticus and Deuteronomy and a whole bunch of other books already took care of that) and instead was like, he read the laws and the people understood them. And then everyone celebrated. Hurrah!

Chapter 9: all the children of Israel attend Sunday school and the highpoints of the entire previous portion of the Bible are recounted in 38 verses or less.*****

So, Nehemiah 9:38 gets us caught up to actual events happening now and is a summary of chapter 10, in which, sure enough “our princes, Levites, and priests seal unto [the covenant]”. I.e, a bunch of named people agree that there are certain rules of this town that everyone has to abide by, mostly involving observing the Sabbath and giving offerings to the church.

In chapters 11 and 12, the people cast lots to see who actually gets to live in the fortified and highly-regulated city. Because all the rules live there, but only one in ten of the regular people do. And we get a list of those one in ten. There’s just no escaping intermittent lists of begats.****** Also, there’s some more celebration in dedication of the city of Jerusalem.

And then in Chapter 13 hits like a load of bricks. It’s back into first person and the narrator (Nehemiah?) is dedicated to his religion and terrible for politics and economics. Keep in mind that most of God’s laws have been previously forgotten because all the Jews were scattered into other lands, and are only now returning to Jerusalem as refugees under the Persian king’s protection. So everyone is attending Sunday school to learn the rules, and the narrator learns that God doesn’t like the Moabites, but apparently the head priest had an alliance with the Moabites and had even prepared them some diplomatic chambers to stay in. So the narrator has those chambers stripped and all of the Moabite’s possessions cast out. And then he discovers that farmers and vintners were working on the Sabbath so he testified against them. And then there were merchants and sellers who sold their goods on the Sabbath so he testified against them too. And then he discovered that some people were still marrying outside of the Jewish religion and so he smote them and plucked off their hair (13:25). And he generally makes everything worse for everyone and expects praise from god for this cleansing.

Summary: These refugees have their new city with their fortified wall but they’re pretty plagued by outsiders being suspicious and insiders forcing them to obey strict religious law.

Moral: If you’re the friend of the King of Persia, you can get support in being an incredible busy-body.

* The King James translation uses a lot of hyphens and apostrophes in the names of various people. Artaxerxes is written as Ar’tax-erx’-es, Nehemiah, the titular character of this book, is written as Ne-he-mi’-ah. And there are plenty of other names with similar presentations: San-bal’-lat, Za’-dok, Me-ron’-o-thite, etc. I’m not sure what the apostrophe stands for, but I’m assuming at this point that the dashes are between syllables. So, it’s essentially a little pronunciation guide that also makes the names look just that much more foreign to my poor sheltered eyes. It feels very disconcerting, though, since I’d previously considered it a sci-fi/fantasy trope to make alien names using excess punctuation and random letter mash-ups. It feels very unexpected to see it happen in the Bible. From my perspective a name has a one-punctuation-mark maximum limit before it looks like it’s trying too hard.**

** If there’s any reader out there with a first name with more than one punctuation mark in it, let me know that I might learn something, but I’m going to want to know the story behind your name and its spelling.

*** They were considered “polluted” and didn’t get to eat the holy food of the priesthood unless and until they can prove they’re actually priests. (Nehemiah 7:64-5)

**** Introduced previously as the moral law scholar that the King of Persia was asshole enough to inflict upon the refugees trying to settle. Now the refugees have to try and learn and abide by all the laws of a very specific god.

***** Seriously? Yes, seriously. If you want a children’s book version of the pervious parts of the bible, just read Nehemiha 9:6-38

****** Although, kind of cool is the fact that some of the begats include professions as well as lineages (although I’m fairly sure their hereditary professions, so there’s that). The professions include, but are not limited to: those who had oversite of the outward business of the house of god (11:16), porters and keepers of the gate (11:19), singers (11:22), those given to praise and give thanks (12:24), those with the musical instruments (12:36)

Next up: Esther

One of my cousins recently graduated from divinity school and he recounted something one of his teachers told him that really stuck with him and now sticks with me: “when giving a sermon, hold the scriptures in one hand and a newspaper in the other.” Given the issues with racism and refugee problems I’ve been seeing in the news recently, this book is particularly on-topic, although not particularly helpful with its conclusions.

This book starts off with Cyrus, King of Persia, having an inspiration. In theory, the idea is god wants a house built for him in Jerusalem; in practice Cyrus bribes Israelite refugees to go over to Jerusalem rather than stay in Persia. And not even with his own funds, just telling the populace, they must give silver, gold, and other goods and livestock to any Israelite from Persia traveling to Jerusalem.

And then we get a massive list of who all the refugees were, where they were from, where they went, and how many they numbered. One thing about reading these books is a reminder of the sheer numbers being dealt with. We’re talking about people in the hundred and thousands and hundreds of thousands.

And then there was a bunch of celebration and prayer and burnt offerings.

Those were chapters 1, 2, and 3. In chapters 4, 5, and 6, however, we discover that bureaucracy is eternal and it turns out various other governing units are not particularly happy with Cyrus’ plan to shift refugees elsewhere, and did anyone actually have a copy of the authorizing letter Cyrus had sent out regarding building the temple? As it turns out, the answer to that last question is “yes,” and if you try to ignore it again King Darius of Persia will have your house torn down and you hung on the scaffold built in its place. So, you know, building that temple continued.

It isn’t until chapter 7 (out of just 10, in the Book of Ezra) that Ezra is introduced as a character. But he’s a scribe in the law of Moses, and under the ongoing patronage of Artaxerxes, kind of Persia.* He’s essentially sent to be a magistrate and enforce god’s law on the people of Jerusalem.

Now chapter 7 is also interesting for being written in the first person, due to most of it being a decree of Artaxerxes, kind of Persia. However, chapter 8 is also in first-person but I’m confused about who exactly it is. Is it safe to assume Ezra? Whoever it is, they gathered a bunch of people – listed in detail – to the river that runneth to Ahava and then contemplated the issue of all of them carrying a bunch of gold through a bandit heavy area. I really enjoyed Ezra 8:22, in which the narrator really doesn’t want to contact the King of Persia to ask for guards for the gold, after having spoken about how great and powerful their god is. Like, that’s just embarrassing. Hahahaha! Anyway, they split up and transport the gold in 12 packages and it all goes well.

In chapter 9, Ezra (I’m assuming) is deeply disturbed about how the Israelites continue to inter-marry and have children with the people who were already living in the lands.

In chapter 10, Ezra (we’re back to the more regular third-person narration) continues to be deeply disturbed by the Israelites having married foreigners, and gathers all the men to discuss the issue. Verses Ezra 10:18-43 list the various males who had taken foreign wives, and even had children by them. But they all promised to “put away their wives” in addition to offering a ram of the flock for their trespass. So… there’s that.

And thus ends the book of Ezra.

Summary: Bureaucracy, racism, and problems with refugees all have long and illustrious histories.

Moral: Yes, money can buy you out of troubles? (Especially other people’s money.) Don’t marry foreigners?

*I’m more than a bit confused by all the Kings of Persia (and/or Babylon – are they the same thing? Is one a subset of the other?), who I assume are ruling sequentially, but the book is a bit coy about the timeline for all of this, which is decidedly unusual, given how specific the books of Kings and the books of Chronicles were. But there are casual and mentions of King Cyrus of Persia and/or Babylon, King Darius of Persia and/or Babylon, and King Artaxerxes of Persia and/or Babylon.

Next up: Nehemiah