Rethinking the ending of Esther
On January 4th I gave a presentation for the Alttestamentliche Sozietät in the HU Theologische Fakultät on my current research, and decided to focus on a new approach I am trying to take to the book of Esther. This is very much still a work in progress, but it will take some form as part of the book I am working on about novellas, specifically in a chapter about the evidence we have for how novellas continued to be rewritten: these were not always final products, but open to further streams of creativity.
My starting point is the evidence: much of the evidence for novellas from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt shows that different versions of the same texts that were undergoing creative transformation were collected, something that looks to me very similar with what we have in Esther, as well as in other works of ancient Judean literature of the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Scholars of the past generation in particular have seized on textual impermanence in early Judean literature, made awesomely manifest by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their full publication in the mid- to late-20th century, and made wide-ranging and influential arguments based on the realities of scribal practice and technique, of learning texts by heart, and of adapting literature for changing circumstances. Building on this, I hope to bring to light the ways that texts live and change depending on how they were read, what they were used for, how they were structured as verbal art: in other words, in close conversation with the notion of genre and poetics.
With Esther, and the Demotic novellas I am studying (and, I will argue, the novella of Tobit as well, but this brings with it its own set of evidence and challenges), I want to 1. pinpoint and articulate the ways that novellas (as a specific kind of literature of prose fiction) organically and/or artfully change, 2. model and reconstruct situations that facilitate that change, and 3. create a typology of how variant and multitext editions of individual novellas were created for different groups of readers.
This is where the ending of Esther comes in, which was the topic of my talk. We do not have any ancient Hebrew texts of the novella, only those preserved from the medieval period, which you’ll find translated in your bibles today. This version of Esther is quite similar in many ways to versions for which there are (in some cases) more ancient and better copies available, but in Greek translation…Greek translations made from different Hebrew versions of the novella that were read in different (or the same!) communities that had copies of Esther like the Hebrew ones we know today. (Though debate is ongoing) there seem to be independent witnesses to at least three popular versions of Esther, and these versions differ significantly in their endings. When you look at the individual versions and take their endings on their own, there is significant traces in each, furthermore, that these endings were re-written and combined with others: as is so often the case, ancient authors and readers leave traces on the texts that they preserve. Put another way, whichever version of Esther we look at, when we try to read the ending, not only do we get a different story than the other copies, but the ending of whichever version we are looking at reads unevenly at times, and seems to have been, perhaps, the project of more than one author or community taking turns trying to round out the story.
If you want to get a sense of this, in translation, here’s what you can do:
- Read chs. 8-10 of the traditional Hebrew text of Esther. You can find it here. You should read the whole thing too!
- Compare the two major Greek versions of the ancient novella that survive here. You can start on p. 435, chapter 7 in this version. The two versions are put in parallel, and you can jump back and forth. They are remarkably different.
In the lecture I just gave, and in the first attack I am making at this complex problem in light of my book on novellas, I am looking specifically at the end of the Hebrew version of Esther (linked at #1 above) and, by comparing it with the Greek versions (#2), suggesting a new approach or paradigm to understanding the history of this version, specifically the ending. In doing this I am trying to build on but also distinguish myself from the ways others have done this with Esther. In terms of traditional and contemporary scholarly approaches, the usual understanding is that there was an older, perhaps standard version of Hebrew Esther that was then expanded several times, not only at the ending but perhaps in its beginning and middle too. The novella received several waves of these expansions, and left a form like we have it today: indeed, if you read chs. 8-10, you can perhaps discern the traces of sections or blocks of material that look to have been added successively.
The approach I am taking is rethinking the ending of Esther in its Hebrew version and showing that, instead of just a series of additions that have all accrued on the same document, there are traces of multiple independent, different endings of the novellas: like we have in the different surviving, independent versions of the novella in Hebrew and in Greek versions, but here, telescoped in some way into a single version. Not a series of expansions, but different independent (and, ultimately, exclusive) endings to a single story which have been combined together and, probably, transformed in some way. I tried to indicate towards these here in my handout and in slides. Very much a work in progress. The key for my future argument is being clear about how much we can reconstruct of these different endings (in terms of actual text that survives), or if we can only approximate. Also crucial for me is explaining why this telescoping happened. What kind of a version of a novella was this supposed to be?
What does the evidence for novellas and their continued creativity from Egypt look like, and how does it help us reconstruct a history of Esther and support this new approach I am taking? The evidence needs its own presentation, but in brief: reading communities not only continued to create new versions of popular novellas, but they kept copies of different versions together, and even, it seems (and this is something on which there is a particular burden for me to give proof, which I’ll do sometime soon), combined them in ways like we see (I think!) with Esther. This is crucial comparative evidence for how ancient authors and readers constructed and preserved texts, something biblical scholars call “empirical models for biblical criticism.” Turning to such evidence in Egypt has been done very little, and is an important part of my project in DEMBIB.
In her 2016 book The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity, Eva Mroczek expanded on a metaphor used by the early Jewish author Ben Sira and spoke about how ancient books were like rivers: growing, changing, meandering, accruing, expanding…I love this. I want to take it further: are all books like rivers? Do they all change and grow in the same way?
You can see the slides of my lecture and my handout here. I’m grateful to the comments and feedback I received during and after my lecture by David Carr, Ivan Dershowitz, Petra Schmidtkunst, and Benjamin Ziemer.