Torah Study Blog

In the Torah, Cyrus the Great of Persia is referred to as the “anointed one” (Isaiah 45:1). In 539 BCE Cyrus defeated the Babylonians, who had exiled the Israelite leaders, and invited the leaders to come home to Jerusalem. Cyrus allowed the Israelites to worship their god and to make their own laws to govern their people. In return, Cyrus required loyalty from the Israelites, and the payment of taxes.

Although the Israelites were delighted with the Persian conquest at first, we can imagine that, after generations of being ruled and required to pay taxes, the Israelites had become disillusioned by the Persians. Evidence of their disillusionment can be found in the book of Esther, where we read the story, or megillah, on Purim.

The holiday of Purim begins this Monday night. The holiday commemorates Esther and Mordecai’s triumph over the evil Haman. The story is told in the book of Esther, and it results in the saving the Jewish people. People may know that Purim celebrations are times for dressing in costume, shaking groggers, and all-around revelry. This story is not based in fact. It is a farcical tale that is meant to be bawdy, silly and ridiculous.

In the story Haman is a high-ranking diplomat in the court of a Persian king named Ahasuerus. In reality, there was not a Persian king named Ahasuerus – but scholars give the setting of the tale as the 5th century BCE, likely during the rule of Xerxes (486-465 BCE) or Artaxerxes II (404- 358 BCE). The megillah reading portrays the Persian king as a person who makes important decisions while very drunk, is easily deceived by Haman, and must be properly led by the quick-witted Esther. (Clearly, the kings of Persia had fallen a long way from being the “anointed one” that Cyrus was.)

On the shabbat before Purim, as well as on Purim itself, we have additional Torah and haftarah readings. This week in Torah Study we looked at the additional readings and discovered that they actually provide important background information about some of the characters in the Purim spiel.

Esther 3:1 identifies the villain of the story, Haman, as being an Agagite – or, one of the offspring of King Agag. The story of King Agag is told in 1 Samuel 15. The prophet Samuel told Saul, the first king of Israel, that God wants Saul to kill all the Amalekites, of whom Agag is the king. Saul is to “Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and suckling, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!” (1 Samuel 15:3). Saul gathered 210,000 men to destroy the Amalekites. However, instead of killing everyone and everything as instructed, Saul and his troops spared King Agag and some of the flocks. Although Saul apologized to Samuel for not doing as explicitly instructed, it was not good enough. The prophet Samuel killed King Agag himself, and Saul fell out of favor with God.

In order to understand why God wanted the Amalekites wiped out, we have to turn to Deuteronomy 25. In this chapter we are told that when the Israelites left Egypt, they trekked using the common grouping of having warriors in front to protect the people, with the soldiers in the back walking with their families. It would have been considered a war crime to attack the families at the back of the march. But this passage tells us that the Amalekites, “surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety ... you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven” (Deuteronomy 25:17-19).

Many people are aware that, yes, there are the Ten Commandments, but the Torah actually gives us a total of 613 mitzvot, or commandments. Three of those commandments involve the Amalekite people: 1) We are commanded to remember their atrocity. 2) We are commanded not to forget their atrocity. And, 3) we are commanded to destroy them.

It is clear that the Amalekites are the lasting enemy of the Israelite people. Haman, in the megillah reading, is an Amalekite and he is a bad guy! It is somewhat problematic that in 1 Samuel all the Amalekites are slaughtered, including King Agag. The fact that King Agag and all his offspring were supposedly slaughtered, meaning there is no way Haman could have come from the line of Agag, is a detail that is left unexplained in the Torah.

Mordecai, the uncle of Esther and a hero of the megillah reading, is identified as a descendant “of Kish, a Benjaminite” (Esther 2:5). Saul, the first king of Israel, is a son of Kish (1 Samuel 9:1).

The story in the book of Esther is that the evil Haman had bamboozled the Persian king Ahasuerus to announce a decree that all the Jews will be killed on a certain day. When Esther and Mordecai unveiled the heinous plot, they ask Ahasuerus to revoke the decree. But, in part of the farcical, Persian stupidity (for which there is no evidence) the Persians cannot revoke a decree once it has been made. Because he cannot revoke the decree, Ahasuerus makes a new decree that the Jews are allowed to assemble and fight for themselves and they may, “destroy, massacre, and exterminate its armed force together with the women and children, and plunder their possessions ... And many of the people of the land professed to be Jews, for the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them” (Esther 8:11-17).

The formerly oppressed Jews had now become the mighty! They went on to strike down almost 76,000 people. And, although they were allowed to take the spoils of war, they did NOT. Rabbi Jaech mentioned the possibility that by connecting Mordecai’s family line to Saul, the author of the story is acknowledging that Saul made a misstep in his time, but this generation corrected that misstep.

Samson Rafael Hirsch (1808-1888), one of the founders of modern orthodoxy, pointed out that the Israelites murdered many, behaving just like the Amalekites. Every human being has the capacity for evil, not just the Amalekites. The Torah tells us not to forget the Amalekites but, when we behave like the Amalekites, we cannot be remembering God. Remember God and preserve your humanity.

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misquotes or misunderstandings in what Rabbi Jaech taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter