Megillat Esther - The Scroll of Esther

This Hebrew scroll was presented to Dr. Robin Sharwood by Mrs Iona Christianson on 19 April 1995, and is held in the Special Collections of the Leeper Library. The date and origin are unknown.

The Book of Esther is part of both the Jewish and Christian canons of Scripture. In the Hebrew Bible (what Christians sometimes refer to as the Old Testament) it is one of the five scrolls (ha megillot) which are read on major festivals. In their chronological order within each Jewish calendar year they are:

• The Song of Songs (read at Pesach, Passover)
• Ruth (read at Shavuot, Pentecost)
• Lamentations (read at Tish'ah b'Av, the 9th of the month of Av - a day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple)
• Ecclesiastes (read on the Sabbath of Sukkoth, Tabernacles)
• Esther (read at Purim, Lots)

The Babylonian Talmud stipulates that on Purim the entire scroll of Esther be read publicly. For the convenience of those who perform this narration, Esther is often copied-out separately, as a smallish scroll such as we see here. It is also the most frequently decorated of any biblical text (although not in this instance). Hence Esther is regarded as the scroll par excellence, and is often referred to simply as ha megillah, or 'The Scroll'.

The origins of Purim lie within the narrative of Esther itself. In fact some commentators argue that this, in many ways rather odd, biblical book (the only one, for example, in which there is no mention of God) found a place in the canon of Scripture solely on the basis that it explains how the festival came about.

Esther is a 'tall story' - a fantastic tale which relates how a Jewish orphan became Queen of the Persian Empire (late-sixth- to late fourth-centuries BCE), at a time when many of her people were living in exile in its provinces, and when Judah itself was under Persian control. Esther, whose ethnic identity remains long-hidden from all in the story but her uncle, Mordecai (and, of course, the reader!) manages, by equal doses of courage and cunning, to avert the threatened extinction of her people at the whim of the arch-villain and king's right hand man, Haman. (Haman decides to cast lots in order to determine the date on which the genocide will take place, hence the name of the festival - Purim, 'lots'). In the process, the excesses and incompetence of the Persian court are mercilessly parodied, and the Jewish people enjoy a victory (of equally absurd proportions) over their enemies in the empire. Mordecai replaces Haman as second in the kingdom, and he and Esther institute Purim as a celebration of this turning-of-the-tables in perpetuity.

The pseudo-liturgical reading of the scroll often takes the form of a Purimspiel, or 'Purim play', that picks up on Esther's self-consciously farcical tone. Audience members are encouraged to cheer at the name of Mordecai and to drown out that of Haman with noise. As in the story itself, the Talmud dictates that a great deal of wine is to be consumed in the course of its annual re-telling and re-hearing, and children traditionally dress up as one of the characters in the story. The carnival atmosphere thus created celebrates the sense of reversal that drives this narrative, in which kings and wise men are fools, the powerful are insecure to the point of neurosis, and 'outsiders' come to occupy centre stage.

This particular scroll (probably early twentieth-century) may have been read at many a Purimspiel, having perhaps originally been intended for use in a synagogue, but rejected for that purpose because of some imperfections in the transcribing of the text. (The easiest of these to detect are the occasional additions in small letters above a line of text, where a word or phrase has been omitted.) VIEW 1

Two scribal traditions peculiar to Esther scrolls, and well illustrated here, are worth noting. The first concerns the list of the ten sons of Haman who were hanged with him on the gallows he had constructed for Mordecai (chapter 9, vv.7-10). These names are written in enlarged lettering VIEW 2, and stand out from the rest of the text in its orderly, even blocks by virtue of being arranged in two distinct columns:

...and	Parshandasa
and	Dalphon... etc.

The rabbis suggest two possible reasons for this:

• large letters indicate importance: the greater the importance of Haman's sons, the greater the significance of Esther's and Mordecai's victory over them;
• columns formed by placing one brick upon another (like the names of Haman's ten sons) are weak compared with walls where there is an overlapping pattern of bricks (such as that formed by the words of the regular Hebrew text). Haman's sons are 'written in' in this way because their position in the story is precarious: they will topple, never again to rise!

Note also that the first letter of the name of the last son, Vayzasa, is lengthened in comparison with how it appears elsewhere - even among the enlarged versions of the same letter VIEW 3 in the left-hand column. This, according the rabbis, reminds us of their collective fate: strung-up one underneath the other on a single long pole!

The second unusual scribal feature occurs later in the same, penultimate chapter, at v.29: a single enlarged letter (tav) VIEW 4 at the start of the word meaning 'she [Esther] wrote' (concerning Purim). Again, the rabbis offer an explanation: just as the letter tav is the last of the Hebrew alphabet, so the story of Esther is the last of the miracles to be included in the Bible. (In the Hebrew Bible the Book of Esther is found with the other festival scrolls towards the end, whereas it appears much earlier in the Old Testament as its books were ordered by the early Christian churches.)

Although not an historical work as we would commonly understand that genre, Esther and its associated festival are poignant and cathartic, if somewhat light-hearted, responses to Israel's historical experience of exile, persecution and attempted genocide. Probably written towards the end of, or just after the Persian period (perhaps during the fourth- or third-century BCE), to read Esther in our own generation - especially in the wake of the Holocaust (Shoah) - is to sense the utter seriousness that is carried by its 'burlesque' flavour and comedic charms.

Purim is kept on the 14th day (or the 15th in Jerusalem) of the twelfth month of the Jewish calendar, Adar. Bearing in mind that the first month of the Jewish calendar is not January but Nissan, the month in which Passover falls, Purim usually occurs about a month before the Christian celebration of Easter. In 2002 it will be observed on February 26.

Compiled by Richard Treloar, Trinity College Theological School, December 2001. (Richard is working towards a PhD on the Book of Esther at Monash University's Centre for Comparative Literature & Cultural Studies.)

This Hebrew scroll was presented to Dr Robin Sharwood by Mrs Iona Christianson on 19 April 1995.
The date and origin unknown, held in the Special Collections of the Leeper Library