Purim: The Hidden Hand of Hashem and the Great Reversal

The Story in Brief: Exile, Danger and a Hidden Hand

The Book of Esther, called in Hebrew Megillat Esther (מגילת אסתר, “the Scroll of Esther”) or simply “the Megillah,” is set in Shushan (Susa), one of the royal capitals of the Persian Empire, in the reign of King Achashverosh. It opens with a royal banquet lasting one hundred and eighty days, then a second of seven days, at the end of which Queen Vashti refuses to be paraded before the king’s drunken guests and is deposed (Esther 1).

A search for a new queen brings Hadassah, called Esther, into the palace. She is an orphan raised by her cousin Mordechai, “a certain Jew” of the tribe of Benjamin, “the son of Jair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish,” whose family had been carried away from Jerusalem with King Jeconiah (Esther 2:5–7). On Mordechai’s instruction Esther hides her people and her kindred (Esther 2:10). Mordechai uncovers a plot against the king’s life; the deed is recorded, then forgotten (Esther 2:21–23).

Haman the Agagite is promoted above all the princes. Mordechai will not bow to him, and Haman, learning that Mordechai is a Jew, resolves to destroy “all the Jews that were throughout the whole kingdom” (Esther 3:6). He casts lots to choose the day:

In the first month, that is, the month Nisan, in the twelfth year of king Ahasuerus, they cast Pur, that is, the lot, before Haman from day to day, and from month to month, to the twelfth month, that is, the month Adar.

The lot falls on the thirteenth of Adar. The word pur (פור) is not Hebrew; the text explains it for its readers. It is the Akkadian pūru, “lot,” and from it the festival takes its name, Purim, “Lots” (Esther 9:24–26).¹

Mordechai urges Esther to go to the king, though anyone who enters unbidden may die (Esther 4:11–14). She asks all the Jews of Shushan to fast for her three days and resolves, “if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16).

From there the story turns. Esther is received and invites the king and Haman to two banquets. On the night between them “could not the king sleep” (Esther 6:1); the chronicles are read to him, and Haman, who has come to ask for Mordechai’s death, is ordered to lead Mordechai through the city in royal robes. At the second banquet Esther reveals her identity and Haman’s plot. Haman is hanged on the gallows he built for Mordechai (Esther 7:10). Since a Persian royal decree cannot be revoked (Esther 8:8), a second decree permits the Jews to defend themselves. On the thirteenth of Adar they prevail, and they rest on the fourteenth (in Shushan, on the fifteenth). Mordechai and Esther then write letters establishing the days of Purim for all generations (Esther 9:20–32).

Achashverosh, Shushan and the Persian World

The Hebrew name Achashverosh (אחשורוש) corresponds closely to the Old Persian Xšayāršā, known in Greek as Xerxes. Most scholars therefore identify the king of the Megillah with Xerxes I, who reigned from 486 to 465 BCE.² The Greek translation of Esther (the Septuagint) and Josephus instead call him Artaxerxes, and the identification was debated in antiquity; but the linguistic match with Xerxes is strong and widely accepted.³

Much in the book fits what is known of the Achaemenid Persian court: the palace at Susa, the royal banquets, the seven princes “which saw the king’s face” (Esther 1:14), the swift royal post riders (Esther 3:13; 8:10; compare Herodotus 8.98), the royal chronicles, the irrevocable law of the Medes and Persians (Esther 1:19; 8:8; compare Daniel 6:8), and Persian loanwords such as partemim (“nobles,” Esther 1:3). The great banquet in the king’s third year (Esther 1:3) would fall about 483 BCE, as Xerxes prepared to invade Greece.⁴

There has also been interest in an official named Marduka who appears in cuneiform administrative texts from the reigns of Darius I and Xerxes, including a tablet published by the Assyriologist Arthur Ungnad in the 1940s that places a Marduka in the royal administration at Susa, and several mentions in the Persepolis archives. Some scholars suggest this could be the biblical Mordechai, who “sat in the king’s gate” (Esther 2:21), perhaps an official post. Others answer that Marduka, a name formed from the god Marduk, was common. The identification is intriguing but debated, not an archaeological confirmation.⁵

Is the story history?

Here honesty requires us to say that scholars disagree. Critical scholars point to features that are difficult to harmonize with what is known from Greek sources: Herodotus names Xerxes’ queen as Amestris, not Vashti or Esther; the empire is said to have one hundred and twenty-seven medinot (“provinces”), while Herodotus lists twenty satrapies; Mordechai’s genealogy, if read as making him himself an exile of 597 BCE, would make him very old under Xerxes. Many therefore read the book as a historical novella, set in a real world and shaped for festive retelling.⁶

Others, including many traditional Jewish and Christian scholars, answer that the queen of Esther 2 need not be the chief wife known to the Greeks, that medinot are smaller districts within the satrapies, that Esther 2:6 can refer to Mordechai’s great-grandfather Kish as the one exiled, and that the book’s accurate knowledge of Persian court life argues for a writer close to the events. Jewish tradition holds the events to be historical and attributes the book’s writing to the Men of the Great Assembly.⁷

We receive Esther as Holy Scripture and as the record of a real deliverance, while listening respectfully to the historical questions and making no claims the evidence does not support.

Haman the Agagite and the Shadow of Amalek

The Megillah introduces Haman as “the son of Hammedatha the Agagite” (Esther 3:1). Agag was the king of Amalek whom King Shaul spared, against the command of Hashem, and whom Shmuel the prophet put to death (1 Samuel 15:8–9, 32–33). Mordechai, for his part, is “the son of Kish, a Benjamite,” the same tribe and the same family name as Shaul son of Kish (1 Samuel 9:1–2). The Megillah does not explain these names; it lets the careful reader hear the echo. The unfinished war of Shaul with Agag is finished by Mordechai with Haman. Josephus already calls Haman an Amalekite by descent, and the Aramaic Targum Sheni traces his genealogy back to Agag and Amalek.⁸

Amalek is the first nation to attack Israel after the Exodus. At Rephidim, while Moshe holds up his hands on the hilltop, Yehoshua fights Amalek below; when Moshe’s hands grow heavy, Aharon and Hur hold them up until sunset (Exodus 17:8–13). Then Hashem commands Moshe to write the memorial in a book, and Moshe builds an altar and names it Hashem Nissi, “Hashem is my banner”:

For he said, Because Hashem hath sworn that Hashem will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.

Deuteronomy adds the moral charge: Amalek “met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God” (Deuteronomy 25:18). Haman is Amalek’s heir, not only by lineage but because he would annihilate a whole people for one man’s refusal to bow. (On the ethical questions raised by the command concerning Amalek, see our article on Shabbat Zachor.)

That is why the Torah reading on Purim morning is Exodus 17:8–16, the battle with Amalek, as the Mishnah prescribes.⁹ See the readings for Purim.

Where Is God in the Megillah?

The Hebrew text of Esther never mentions the name of God. There is no recorded prayer, no prophet, no explicit miracle.

The Greek version of Esther adds six passages, including prayers of Mordechai and Esther, in which God is named again and again; many scholars think they were written partly to supply what Greek readers felt was missing.¹⁰ The Hebrew book read in the synagogue keeps God behind the curtain, and the sages saw that as a message. The Talmud asks, playfully, where Esther is hinted at in the Torah, and answers with a verse from Moshe’s last days:

And I will surely hide my face in that day for all the evils which they shall have wrought.

In Hebrew, “I will surely hide” is haster astir (הסתר אסתיר), which sounds like Esther. “Where is Esther in the Torah? ‘And I will surely hide My face.’”¹¹ The idea behind the wordplay is hester panim (הסתר פנים), “the hiding of the Face”: a time when Hashem does not act openly but still governs history from behind it. The Megillah is the book of hester panim. A sleepless king, a chronicle open at the right page, a queen who happens to be Jewish: the reader is meant to see that nothing merely “happens.”

Mordechai’s own words come closest to naming God: “If thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place” (Esther 4:14). Many commentators hear in “another place” (makom acher) a veiled reference to Hashem, who in rabbinic language is called HaMakom, “the Place.”¹² Either way, Mordechai is certain the covenant people will not be abandoned. Most believers live most of their lives in the Book of Esther, not the Book of Exodus; Purim teaches that the hidden God is not an absent God.

How Esther Entered the Canon

Esther’s place in Scripture was not reached without discussion. The Talmud records that Esther asked the sages to “establish me for the generations,” and that they hesitated because a festival and a book about the nations’ hatred might provoke the nations, until they found a basis in Scripture. The same passage cites Shmuel’s opinion that Esther “does not render the hands impure,” the rabbinic technical term for a book of Holy Scripture, while the Talmud also affirms that Esther “was said with the Ruach HaKodesh.”¹³ The debate was resolved: Esther is one of the Five Megillot in the Writings and is fully sacred.¹⁴

Two outside facts are worth knowing. First, Esther is the only book of the Hebrew Bible of which no fragment has been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. This may be chance, but many scholars think the community at Qumran, with its own priestly calendar, did not observe Purim or treat Esther as authoritative.¹⁵ Second, the earliest outside reference to the festival comes from 2 Maccabees, which mentions the thirteenth of Adar as “the day before Mordecai’s day” (2 Maccabees 15:36). By the second century BCE, then, the fourteenth of Adar was already known as a Jewish festival linked to Mordechai.¹⁶ Some early church writers also omitted Esther, among them Melito of Sardis.¹⁷

The Four Mitzvot of Purim

Mordechai’s letter sets out what the days are for:

As the days wherein the Jews rested from their enemies, and the month which was turned unto them from sorrow to joy, and from mourning into a good day: that they should make them days of feasting and joy, and of sending portions one to another, and gifts to the poor.

The Jews then “ordained, and took upon them, and upon their seed, and upon all such as joined themselves unto them” to keep these two days every year, “that these days should be remembered and kept throughout every generation” (Esther 9:27–28). Notice “all such as joined themselves unto them”: from the start, Purim includes those from the nations who attach themselves to Israel (compare Esther 8:17).

From these verses, and from the requirement to “remember,” the sages derive four mitzvot.

1. Reading the Megillah (Mikra Megillah)

The Megillah is read twice: at night, when Purim begins, and again during the day. The Talmud bases this on Psalm 22:3, “O my God, I cry in the daytime… and in the night season,” and it rules that women are equally obligated, “for they too were included in that miracle.”¹⁸ The scroll is read from a handwritten parchment, and listeners follow every word. Before it, three blessings are said, including “Who performed miracles for our fathers” and Shehecheyanu.

Customs during the reading include:

• Blotting out Haman’s name. When Haman is named, the congregation stamps, whistles or spins noisemakers (Yiddish gragger). The Rema records the custom of children drawing Haman’s image and striking it, and says that no custom should be lightly abolished.¹⁹
• The ten sons of Haman (Esther 9:7–9) are read in a single breath, and the Talmud requires them to be written in a column by themselves.²⁰

Hallel is not said on Purim. The Talmud gives two reasons: “its reading is its Hallel,” and because after the miracle “we are still the servants of Achashverosh,” still in exile.²¹ Instead, Al HaNissim (“For the miracles”) is added to the Amidah and to the grace after meals.

2. Sending portions (Mishloach Manot)

“Sending portions one to another” is fulfilled, according to the Talmud, by sending at least two kinds of ready-to-eat food to at least one person.²² The people Haman called “scattered abroad and dispersed” (Esther 3:8) answer by binding themselves together.

3. Gifts to the poor (Matanot La’evyonim)

The same Talmudic passage requires at least two gifts, to two poor people. Maimonides makes this mitzvah the heart of the day:

It is better for a person to increase his gifts to the poor than to increase his meal and his portions to his friends, for there is no greater and more glorious joy than to gladden the hearts of the poor, the orphans, the widows and the converts.

He adds that one who gladdens the hearts of the unfortunate is like the Shechinah, citing Isaiah 57:15.²³ Purim joy that forgets the poor is not Purim joy.

4. The festive meal (Se’udat Purim)

A festive meal is held on Purim day, usually in the afternoon, with bread, meat or other fine food, wine and song. The miracle came through banquets, and the meal re-enacts it in joy.

“Until he does not know”

The most famous and most misused line of Purim law is Rava’s saying in the Talmud: “A person is obligated to become intoxicated on Purim until he does not know (ad delo yada) the difference between ‘cursed is Haman’ and ‘blessed is Mordechai.’” The Talmud follows it at once with a cautionary tale: Rabbah and Rabbi Zeira held a Purim feast together, became drunk, and Rabbah “slaughtered” Rabbi Zeira; the next day he prayed and Rabbi Zeira was revived. A year later Rabbah invited him again, and Rabbi Zeira replied, “Miracles do not happen every hour.”²⁴

Several medieval authorities read the story as a rejection of Rava’s statement. Maimonides rules that one drinks wine “until he becomes intoxicated and falls asleep in his intoxication,” which means sleep, not wildness.²⁵ The Rema writes that one need not become drunk at all, but may drink somewhat more than usual and sleep, “and whether one does more or less, as long as he directs his heart to Heaven.”²⁶ Anyone who may neglect a mitzvah, behave crudely or endanger himself or others should not drink at all. The point of “not knowing” is a joy so complete that the difference between the downfall of the wicked and the rise of the righteous is swallowed up in praise of the One who did both. It is never permission for sin.

Shushan Purim and Walled Cities

Because the Jews of Shushan fought for two days and rested on the fifteenth, the Megillah distinguishes “the Jews of the villages, that dwelt in the unwalled towns,” who keep the fourteenth, from the Jews of Shushan who keep the fifteenth (Esther 9:18–19). The Mishnah turns this into law: “Cities surrounded by a wall from the days of Yehoshua son of Nun read on the fifteenth,” while villages and large towns read on the fourteenth.²⁷ The sages chose Yehoshua’s time to honor the Land of Israel, which lay in ruins in Mordechai’s day.

In practice, almost every community in the world keeps Purim on 14 Adar. Jerusalem, whose walls are undisputed, keeps Shushan Purim on 15 Adar; a few other ancient cities in the Land of Israel read on both days because their status is in doubt. Elsewhere Shushan Purim is a day of lesser rejoicing on which Tachanun is not said. In a leap year Purim is kept in Adar II; the corresponding days in Adar I are Purim Katan.

The day before Purim, 13 Adar, is the Fast of Esther, and the Shabbat before Purim is Shabbat Zachor. Before Purim many give the machatzit hashekel (half-shekel), remembering the Temple tax announced on Shabbat Shekalim. See our calendar for each year’s dates.

Customs Old and New

Many of the best-loved Purim customs are later developments, and it is good to know which is which.

• Costumes and masks. Dressing up is not mentioned in the Talmud. The custom is documented among European Jews in the late Middle Ages; Rabbi Yehudah Mintz, a fifteenth-century Italian authority, permitted it, and the Rema cites his ruling.²⁸ Popular explanations connect it to the hiddenness of Esther’s identity and of God’s hand in the story. These are lovely homiletical readings, not the historical origin.
• Purim pastries. Ashkenazi Jews eat three-cornered hamantaschen, whose Yiddish name probably first meant “poppy-seed pockets” (mohn-taschen) and was later linked to Haman. Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews eat fried pastries called oznei Haman, “Haman’s ears.”
• The Adloyada. In the Land of Israel, the Tel Aviv Purim carnival began in 1912; its name Adloyada was coined from Rava’s phrase ad delo yada. Many Israeli towns now hold street parades.²⁹

Purim in the Shadow of the Shoah

Persecuted communities have always read their own story into the Megillah. Their persecutors sometimes did too. On 16 October 1946, ten men convicted at the Nuremberg trials were hanged; Hermann Göring, who was to have been the eleventh, took poison the night before. One of the ten was Julius Streicher, the publisher of the antisemitic paper Der Stürmer. According to the eyewitness report of the American journalist Kingsbury Smith, Streicher cried out on the gallows, “Purim Fest 1946!”³⁰

Some note the parallel with Esther 9:13–14, where ten sons of Haman are hanged. A later tradition also points to three small letters in the list of Haman’s sons in some Megillah scrolls, tav, shin and zayin, whose numerical value (707) matches the Hebrew year 5707 (1946–47). That observation should be held lightly: scribal traditions about small letters vary, and the connection with Nuremberg appears to have been made only decades later.³¹

Was Yeshua in Jerusalem for Purim?

John 5:1 reads: “After this there was a feast of the Jews; and Yeshua went up to Jerusalem.” John names Pesach, Sukkot and Chanukah elsewhere, but this feast is unnamed. Some important manuscripts read “the feast,” which would point to a major pilgrimage festival, while others, including the earliest papyri, read “a feast.”³²

Interpreters have proposed Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, Rosh Hashanah and Purim. For Purim: John 4:35 (“yet four months, and then cometh harvest”) suggests winter, John 6:4 says Pesach was near, and Purim falls a month before Pesach. Against: Purim was not a pilgrimage festival requiring a journey to Jerusalem. The text does not settle the question, and we should not pretend it does.³³ Either way, Yeshua kept Israel’s festival calendar.

For Such a Time as This: Esther and the Intercession of Messiah

Mordechai’s question to Esther has become one of the most quoted lines in the Bible:

And who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?

Esther’s answer is an act of self-giving. She fasts three days, puts her life at risk, and goes in to the king “which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16). She stands between her condemned people and the throne, pleading for their lives.

The Brit Hadashah (the New Testament) describes Yeshua in similar terms, as the one who, raised from the dead and exalted at God’s right hand, intercedes for his people:

Who is he that condemneth? It is Messiah that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. — Romans 8:34

Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.

The Megillah is not a prophecy about Yeshua. This is typology, the recognition of a pattern: Hashem repeatedly saves His people through a chosen one who identifies with them, risks everything and pleads before the King. Yosef, Moshe (Exodus 32:32) and Esther each show part of it. Many Messianic teachers see the pattern fulfilled most fully in the Mashiach, who did not only risk death but went into it, and whom Hashem raised up. The difference matters as much as the likeness: Esther approached a capricious king who might have killed her; Yeshua approaches the Father, who sent him in love (John 3:16), and he intercedes before a throne of grace, not of terror (Hebrews 4:16).

There is a striking Jewish echo here. The Talmud says that when Esther entered the inner court and felt the Divine Presence depart from her, she cried out the opening words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”³⁴ The rabbis read the psalm, whose heading speaks of “the hind of the dawn” (ayelet hashachar), as Esther’s prayer. The same psalm is on Yeshua’s lips on the cross (Matthew 27:46). Two righteous intercessors, each for a moment feeling forsaken, each crying the psalm that ends in praise: “they shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this” (Psalm 22:31).

“For such a time as this” also speaks to every believer. Esther did not choose her moment; she chose how to answer it.

Venahafoch Hu: Reversal and Resurrection

The key phrase of the Megillah comes at its climax:

In the day that the enemies of the Jews hoped to have power over them, (though it was turned to the contrary, that the Jews had rule over them that hated them;)

“It was turned to the contrary” is in Hebrew venahafoch hu (ונהפוך הוא), “and it was overturned.” The whole book is built on reversals: Haman plans Mordechai’s humiliation and leads his parade; Haman builds a gallows and hangs on it; the day appointed for destruction becomes a day of victory; the month “turned unto them from sorrow to joy, and from mourning into a good day” (Esther 9:22).

The greatest reversal in the Brit Hadashah is the resurrection. The righteous one is condemned and executed, and on the third day Hashem raises him (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Death, which seemed to have the last word, is itself overturned (1 Corinthians 15:54–55). It is worth noticing that the Megillah’s turning point also comes “on the third day”: “Now it came to pass on the third day, that Esther put on her royal apparel” (Esther 5:1). A midrash on this verse gathers the “third days” of Scripture (Avraham at the binding of Yitzchak, Yosef’s brothers in prison, Yonah in the fish, and Esther) together with Hosea 6:2, “after two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up,” and concludes that Hashem never leaves Israel in distress for more than three days.³⁵ The midrash is not speaking of Yeshua, but followers of Yeshua may hear the resurrection in its pattern, as homiletic reflection rather than the plain meaning of Esther 5:1. Purim trains the heart to expect that the last chapter will not look like the middle one.

Amalek from Generation to Generation: The Prophetic Horizon

The Torah’s oath, “Hashem will have war with Amalek from generation to generation” (Exodus 17:16), tells us that Haman was neither the first nor the last of his kind. Rashi, following the midrash, reads the unusual wording of that verse, kes Yah (with a shortened throne and a shortened Name), to teach that Hashem’s Name and throne are not “complete” until Amalek’s memory is blotted out.³⁶ Amalek’s final defeat belongs to the coming of the Kingdom. Obadiah ends with the same horizon: “And saviours shall come up on mount Zion to judge the mount of Esau; and the kingdom shall be Hashem’s” (Obadiah 1:21).

Later Jewish apocalyptic writing gives the final adversary a name. In Sefer Zerubbabel, a Hebrew apocalypse usually dated to the seventh century CE, a tyrant called Armilus makes war on Israel, kills Mashiach ben Yosef, and is finally destroyed when Mashiach ben David is revealed.³⁷ The details are medieval legend, but the shape of the hope is biblical: the last enemy, like Amalek and Haman, will rise and will fall. The Brit Hadashah speaks of a final “man of sin” whom the Master Yeshua will destroy “with the spirit of his mouth” (2 Thessalonians 2:3–8; compare Isaiah 11:4). We hold these texts with sober hope, naming no modern person as the final adversary and reading no headlines into prophecy.

Purim also proclaims the indestructibility of Israel. Haman’s plan failed because Hashem’s covenant with Avraham’s descendants cannot fail. Paul says the same of the Jewish people in his own day:

As touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes. For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.

Revelation 12 pictures this in vivid images: a woman, crowned with twelve stars, gives birth to a son who is caught up to God’s throne; the dragon pursues her, but she is carried into the wilderness and nourished there, and when the dragon cannot destroy her he makes war on “the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Yeshua Messiah” (Revelation 12:17). The woman, whose twelve stars recall Yosef’s dream (Genesis 37:9), is most naturally read as Israel. Like the Megillah, it teaches that the people of God will be preserved and the dragon’s end is certain (Revelation 20:10).

There is one more remarkable tradition. Maimonides rules, following the Jerusalem Talmud, that all the books of the Prophets and Writings will one day be “nullified” (that is, no longer needed in the same way) in the days of Mashiach except the Scroll of Esther, and that the days of Purim will never cease, “as it is said, ‘And these days of Purim shall not fail from among the Jews, nor the memorial of them perish from their seed’” (Esther 9:28).³⁸ Even in the Kingdom, the redeemed will remember the day the decree of death was overturned, and the memory of deliverance will become everlasting praise (Revelation 5:9–10).

Keeping Purim

Purim is a day of joy, but it is a disciplined joy with clear content. In general terms:

• Prepare. Read the Megillah at home in the days before Purim. Many keep the Fast of Esther on 13 Adar (moved earlier when it falls on Shabbat) and give the half-shekel before Purim.
• Hear the Megillah twice. Hear every word, at night and in the morning. Bring noisemakers for Haman’s name, and keep quiet for everything else.
• Send portions. Send at least two kinds of ready-to-eat food to at least one friend; it is a lovely way to welcome a newcomer or include someone alone.
• Give to the poor. Give to at least two people in need, or through a trustworthy fund that distributes on Purim day, and give more to the poor than you spend on your own celebration.
• Feast with gladness. Hold a festive meal on Purim afternoon, with song and words of Torah. If you drink, drink responsibly; never endanger yourself or others, and never let celebration slide into sin.
• Say Al HaNissim in the Amidah and in the grace after meals.
• Remember the deeper story. Pray for the Jewish people and the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6). Thank Hashem for His hidden hand in your own life, and ask what He has placed in your hand “for such a time as this.”

See our calendar for this year’s dates, and the readings for Purim.

The Jews had light, and gladness, and joy, and honour.