Remarkable Parallels and Intriguing Differences: Daniel and Esther

This was an old post I drafted and then lost track of. Perhaps of interest . . . .





For a number of years now, I've been experimenting with different ways of reading through the Bible; different arrangements of the books, different speeds (a chapter or so a day, vs. a whole book at a sitting). Recently I read Esther and Daniel, each in one go, on successive Sundays, and realized how remarkably parallel in theme, episodes, and theology the two works are.

Both deal with Jews exiled in a great empire. The Jew or Jews have been recruited by the command of the emperor (Esther 2, Dan. 1:3ff). As part of that command they undergo a kind of trial (the beauty treatments of Esther 2 and the training and feeding of Daniel 1). In this trial, they have the assistance of the court's eunuchs whose favor they win. Once at the court they face the jealousy of rivals (Haman in Esther 3, the counsellors in Daniel 6), who attack them on basis of being a people who refuse the law of other nations. At crucial moments, when asked to go into the presence of the ruler and risk death, the highest-placed ones asks their supporters to pray for them (Esther 4:15-17; Daniel 2:18), and in the end they pass the test spectacularly, and the rival counsellors are punished by the same punishment they planned for the Jews, together with their wives and children (Esther 7:9-10; Daniel 6:24). A crucial narrative motif in is the idea that the laws of the Medes and Persians cannot be changed (Esther 1:18, Daniel 6:12, 15) -- this prevents the benevolent Median-Persian king from defending Esther/Daniel, so that they must rely on either communal self-defense (Esther) or else God's hand (Daniel).

So those are the remarkable parallels. What are the intriguing differences?

The most obvious is related to the famous absence in Esther of any explicit mention of God. Daniel on the other hand is quite soaked through with references to the "Most High." The second is the complete absence in Esther of either the civil disobedience theme or the rise and fall of empires, which together define the first and second halves of Daniel. No trace of judgment on the Persian monarchy can be found anywhere in Esther. (As noted here, it is important to distinguish the Hebrew Esther here from well-nigh infallible sources such as Herodotus, Three Hundred, and the Greek apocryphal additions to Esther.) In Daniel asceticism is emphasized with the vegetarian diet; in Esther cosmetics occupies that niche -- hardly something compatible with asceticism. In Daniel 2, the prophet actually delivers the astrologers (i.e. the rival servants of the king) from the wrath of the king while Esther replaces Vashti without a backward glance (Esther 1:9-2:17). In Esther, the Jews defend themselves with their own hands, but in Daniel, it is always God who intervernes to defend His chosen one. In every respect Daniel illustrates the highest standards of Christian morals, while Esther seems fleshly and sub-Christian in its vengefulness.

Remember the rule of allegorical interpretation enunciated by Philo, Augustine, and other writers? If a Biblical story seems to have a morally indefensible point, this is a clue that it is to be read as allegory. With that in mind, I wonder if Esther is not in fact an allegory in which Ahasuerus plays the role of God, Vashti of the powerful and arrogant nations, and the Esther of Israel, God's humbled people. God is then there in person of King Ahasuerus -- this would explain why he is not placed under judgment in the story. The beauty treatment then is the church making herself pleasing to God. The repeated use of the term mishta "feast" (twenty times in Esther, vs. twenty-four in the rest of the Hebrew Bible; see here) suggests the fellowship of God and his beloved, culminating in the victorious feast of Purim. Just as Esther shows no concern over Vashti's fate, so God's church must not second guess our King's predestinating judgment in her favor. Ahasuerus's inability to say "no" is God's willingness to hear prayer -- all you need to do is humbly ask. Sometimes it seems like God has forgotten his people and their good deeds just as Ahasuerus has forgotten Mordechai's good loyalty -- but they are written in His book and will be remembered. Purim becomes a type of the triumph of God's people through the church's reliance on the good favor of the King to be bold in resisting the attacks of the world powers who seem for the moment to have God's favor.

In short, I suggest that while Daniel is a realistic story of how individual Christians should act in a world run by nations often in rebellion against Him, Esther is an allegory of the church's collective position among the nations of the world all competing for God's favor, and God's favor to her.

The Archaic Law: To Recapitulate It or Spiritually Repudiate It?

I have been reading Rene Girard lately and find it immensely stimulating, even though I often feel, like Marx with Hegel, that to be read correctly he has to be stood on his head. Even so, the insights gained are tremendous. Let me cite here simply his definition of religion:

Any phenomenon associated with acts of remembering, commemorating, and perpetuating a unanimity that springs from the murder of a surrogate victim can be termed "religious" (Reader, pp. 26-27).

In this sense, one may indeed wonder whether Buddhism for example, is a religion, but one can be in no doubt that every conquest or revolution is a religious act, and every state founded by revolution or conquest -- and that about covers them -- is a religion in the Girardian sense. Girard tends to avoid the political realm, but it is unavoidable in this connection. When he does touch on it, he produces similarly brilliantly illuminating apothegms:

Political power has been rooted in the crowd since the foundation of the world (p. 214).

In the Secret History of the Mongols, for example, Chinggis Khan's killing of his half-brother Begter, and of his blood-brother Jamugha is a presented implicitly as the sacrifice of a surrogate victim, which produces unanimity and a blessing.

Girard is quite popular with both First Things writers (here, here, and here, for example) and the Reformed Dougs in Moscow, Idaho and their supporters (here, here, and here, for example). I wonder very much about whether they have in fact understood him, since in many ways his interpretation appears to be rather contradictory to Catholic or Refomed theology. Let's note a few things that might cause problems: he acknowledges that he is the first person to read the Gospels in the way that he does (p. 183), that the orthodox "sacrificial" interpretation of the Gospels has obscured its true utterly anti-sacrificial significance from the first years of the apostles (p. 193), that the appropriation of the logic of the Gospel for the defense of culture and social order is in fact the work of Christians who are the Antichrist (p. 207), and that Girard himself rediscovered it solely through reading the text of Scripture (pp. 183-84). Every plank of radical restorationism is in place. Know what you are getting into, if you read him.

And yet, somehow it doesn't feel like heresy. Let's leave aside the extraordinary light he sheds upon his favorite Biblical texts. Let's take his reading of the founding fall. It is not Adam and Eve, whom he virtually never mentions, but Cain's murder of Abel. This is heresy -- or is it? Isn't this the basis for John saying that Satan was a liar and a murderer from the beginning? That instigating murder was Satan's primal intervention into our history? And although Girard seems unaware of the fact, Prudentius's Christian poems also treat Cain's murder of Abel as the real inception of sinful humanity. To rediscover by chance strands of ancient Christian thought long ago consigned to the attic; that is something worth paying attention to.

But the reading of Girard has suffered from inadequate contextualization. What is the context in which we ought to read him; what is his fundamental problem? He began as a literary scholar, reading the nineteenth century novels. He then turned to anthropology, exploring the byways of obscure native religions. Most of his writing now centers on Biblical interpretation and exegesis. However he got there, however, his mature writings are fundamentally an attempt to resolve a single problem: what is the relation of the Old Covenant and the New? Or to put it a bit differently (and perhaps a bit misleadingly for Augsburg Evangelicals): what is the relation of the Law and the Gospel?

But it must be always remembered Girard is a thinker who relates Christian revelation to the full scale of human cultural diversity. Or to put it differently, he emphasizes how the Christian Gospels are the fulfillment and supersession not simply of the Mosaic Law, but of all sacrificial law, all sacrificial "mythology" (i.e. all the historical, yet mysticized murders of innocent substitutes). In short, one could take the python myth of the Venda in South Africa, and show how the life and death of Jesus exposes and unwinds the mechanism commemorated and sanctified by that myth, just as it exposes and unwinds the mechanism commemorated and sanctified by the death of Achan (to chose a Biblical example not addressed by Girard).

Let me put Girard and the Law-Gospel problem in historical context. The religious legacy of mankind goes back to five archaic Laws given to peoples in a band from west to east in Eurasia, and embodied in the scriptures reverenced in continuous line until today. They are Homer, Hesiod and the Homeric hymns in Greek, the Law of Moses and the Former Prophets (Joshua-2 Kings) in Hebrew, the Avestan in Old Persian, the Vedas in Sanskrit, and the Five Classics in Chinese. This is the earliest stratum of the cultural heritage, directly or vicariously, of virtually all of humanity.

What do these have in common? That they are Laws for theocratic states in which the divine will is knowable through divination (urim and thummim, the milfoil straws, entrails), in which the divinity takes pleasure in the sweet savor of burnt animal offerings, in which purity regulations govern all aspects of life, particularly relating to discharges from the body (semen, blood, spit, etc.), in which the duty to procreate is universal and in which both war, the death penalty, slavery, and polygamy/concubinage are accepted without remark as part of the order of life, and in which revelation comes in one sacred language to one sacred people surrounded by barbarian gentiles.

What is the problem of Girard? It is the perennial problem since the middle of the first millennium BC, of what to do with this era of revelation, when so much of it seems so barbaric and primitive, so much superseded by the later revelations of the prophets and sages. Yet those prophets and sages themselves, paradoxically, reverenced these revelations as being the classic patterns of ideal society.

In general, the problem of religious diversity and cultural heritage has been approached by trying to identify which of these five languages holds the truest and the best revelation. What should we take as the text teaching us the true and fundamental pattern of life? The Iliad and the Odyssey? The Law of Moses? The Vedas and Upanishads? Once that is decided, then we decide which interpretation of that Law is the truest. (This is the procedure of Pascal, more or less: start with the Jews who are obviously a unique people, and then ask whether the New Testament makes sense as a fulfillment of the Jewish Law.) But Girard offers implicitly another way of conceptualizing the problem: given that all of these archaic texts share so much, perhaps we should ask, what is the general type of relation which these archaic texts have to the later revelation of Truth? What should our relation be to the Laws for a theocratic kingdom of sacrificial scapegoats and purity laws separating clean insiders and unclean outsiders? Not least because each one of them came under radical attack by foreign conquest, intellectual questioning, and the importation of new teachings and texts.

There are five possibilities:

1) Repristination: to reemphasize these laws and in so doing rebuild the sacral social order. The Confucians were fortunate in having a kingdom still found on the land and in having archaic classics which seems to be among the least "archaic" in spirit (perhaps because large chunks achieved final form only in the first century BC), and at times followed this. The laws of Islam seem also to have the features of repristination of a streamlined and modernized law of Moses. (One of the peculiar aspects of Islam is how a highly "advanced," not to say philosophical, concept of God is yoked to an archaic-seeming law.) The theonomist stream of Puritanism was in some ways another example of this.

2) Rationalist Dismissal: the whole archaic law has no normative value whatsoever, and probably was forged. It is primitive, backward, and superstitious. Stop reading it, and if you read it, dont take it seriously. This position has been greatly strengthened since the eighteenth century by the increasing doubts over authenticity surrounding all the archaic classics.

3) Reinterpretation: Here the archaic Law is seen not as something intended to be applied in real life but to teach us about the control of the passions, or the soul's search for God. Much of later Confucian interpretation of the Yijing, or Talmudic midrash and allegorical readings of the Scriptures would belong here, as would Neo-Platonic allegorical exegesis of Homer and other myths. Much of Vaishnavite and Shaivite Hinduism has this relation to the Vedas, I would guess.

4) Spiritual Repudiation: The old law did not teach the right way of liberation or salvation, which was revealed only later. While many of its basically religious, supernatural presuppositions are still accepted, as texts, the archaic laws are a source only of cultural and historical heritage devoid of normative force. Buddhism largely takes this line toward the Sanskrit scriptures, and Quakerism and Marcionism do the same for the Law of Moses, while Stoicism does the same with the Greco-Roman religious law.

5) Recapitulation: The old law is recapitulated, summed up, in one episode or instance or prophetic life, which is then perpetuated by reenactment. The old law is thus not exactly rejected, but not repristinated either. I don't know enough about Mithraism or Manichaeism to say if this definitedly is, as I suspect, the primary model of how they relate to Zoroastrianism, but this certainly is St. Irenaeus's interpretation of the relation of Christianity to the Law of Moses.

What is Girard saying then? Two things he is certainly rejecting: repristination and rationalist rejection. Likewise allegorical reinterpretation is not on the agenda. Girard wishes to take the archaic law at its word -- it really is about pleasing God and sacralizing the socio-political order by offering up innocent victims in sacrifice. The real question is, then, is he offering a new spiritual repudiationist reading, in which Christ points out the nullity of the old law, or else a recapitulationist reading? Repudiation might seem the obvious choice, except that it seems to lead into rationalist dismissal, which he likewise repudiates. He also sees the Mosaic Law as less clearly archaic than the archaic laws of other peoples: the Law is the message of Christ struggling to get out from a still partly archaic and sacrificial context. Since I believe he is not really correct about this and that the basic features of the archaic law are visible at the heart of the Hebrew classics, one could say that in a sense he is a offering a reinterpretation, along the lines of the wheat and the chaff.

But this is the red thread running so much of human literary, religious, and humanistic culture today: what do we do with the archaic classics and the ideal they present of sacralized theocracy founded on sacrifice and ritual cleanliness? If we don't dismiss them, can we ever get free of war and violence? But if we do dismiss them, do we become strangers not just to our own ancestors, but to ourselves? And if we reinterpret them, aren't we being dishonest? I do believe that recapitulation is the only way to reject the ideal of archaic theocracy but still understand ourselves and our ancestors, and that Christianity is the only viable program of recapitulation, and hence the only point of view from which the archaic classics -- not just the Hebrew ones, but any of them -- can be understood in the twenty-first century (the example of this type of analysis done here might explain what I mean). But that means it is all the more necessary that we get recapitulation, and how it sums up all the archaic classics, right.

Dates in the Prophets and Who Are the Poor?

In the last two weeks, I noted two things in the Bible. I thought I 'd throw them both out and try to keep it brief (hah!)

First of all, while reading the two minor prophets Haggai and Zechariah, I had long noticed how carefully they are dated to so and so year and so and month and day of King Darius. Suddenly, however, it occurred to me that that is more than just specifying the date. Rather it says something important about political leigitmacy. We tend to forget, but years and lordship are intimately connected. In China, for example, years are dated by reign years proclaimed by the emperor. But what if there were two dynasties dividing "all under heaven" and someone in one dynasty referred to something happening in another dynasty? Well, they might use the other other dynasty's dating system, but insert the word wei "bogus" before it. "In the bogus Tranquil Peace years of the bogus Jin dynasty, this or that happened." In the Roman empire, the use of dating to the emperorship of Jesus was contrasted to the dating by the Roman emperor, as we see explicitly in the martyrdom of Polycarp:

Now the blessed Polycarp was martyred on the second day of the first half of the month of Xanthicus, the seventh day before the kalends of March, a great sabbath, at the eighth hour. And he was arrested by Herod, when Philip of Tralles was High Priest, when Statius Quadratus was Pro-Consul, but Jesus Christ was reigning for ever, to whom be glory, honour, majesty and an eternal throne, from generation to generation, Amen.

After the confessionalization of Western Eurasia, the three religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) had their own dating systems -- which one you used depended on which one you believed in.* Recently, Jewish authors began using the Christian system (which unlike the Jewish one has the benefit of not being tied to an impossibly recent date of the creation of the world), but in an unconscious imitation of Chinese practice, they change AD to CE and BC to BCE. They might have just as well have written "In year 1954 of the wei (bogus) Messiah." This usage has spread widely among those writing on topics outside Christendom, in a futile attempt to create a dating system that is neutral.

So then, what does it mean that Haggai begins:

In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, in the first day of the month, came the word of the LORD by Haggai the prophet unto Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Josedech, the high priest, saying . . .

And Zechariah:

In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, came the word of the LORD unto Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo the prophet, saying . . .

Well it means that these prophets recognize the legitimate authority of king Darius, that this Persian king is not an evil emperor, like the Babylonians or Assyrians, but a legitimate king. It is thus one more part of the strongly pro-Persian slant of the later Old Testament (more on that here).


And who are "the poor" in Jesus's first sermon?

And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

We all know the two "standard" interpretations: the poor are low-income groups (social gospel), or the poor are the poor in spirit, i.e. those under conviction of sin (evangelical).

But going back to where this passage came from, i.e. from Isaiah's prophetic preaching to exiled Judah, it struck me that not just the second, but the first as well, is distorted by unintended individualism. To whom was Isaiah preaching? Not to the statistically lower 20% of the Babylonian population, nor to all those in Babylonia suffering pangs of conscience, but to a specific ethno-religious group, the Jews, who were despised for their corporate identity. He was promising that their hour of liberation, in which they would be freed of their bonds and strangerhood, was nigh. If a Jew did well in Babylonia and put a little money by (like Daniel), he was still part of a subject nation. He may be rich personally, but if he identifies with the despised community, then he longs for liberation as well -- indeed all the more as he moves out of the Jewish villages along the canal of Khebar and into the mainstream of Babylonian life, and faces head-on the assumptions and prejudices of the average successful Babylonian.

God's deliverance from this in time came about through the Persian armies of Cyrus. And as I've shown, the Jews were properly grateful to their liberators.

But what about sin? Surely there is a Gospel message here? Well, why were the Jews in exile in Babylon in the first place? Because they were sinners and couldn't help sinning and had no free will in the matter, and if given the same kingdom would do exactly the same as their fathers before them. That is bondage. Corporate bondage as a people, as a church. And that bondage was, as prophets like Isaiah kept telling them, the reason for the first bondage.

So if he is announcing the message of Isaiah, Jesus is saying: you of my people are indeed despised and thought to be stupid and backwards. You are poor, even if you have some money saved ( -- unless of course you decide to no longer identify with this despised religion and instead join the Greeks, in which case this sermon and this promise is not addressed to you). But your moment of liberation is coming. But God has also seen your failure to be the people of God. He knows that you have not and cannot live the kingdom life of the people of God. And He will liberate you from this as well, all through His own working.

This is indeed Gospel, a collective and apocalyptic good news of redemption from sin and its justified punishment, delivered to His people, and coming soon in the end of days.

A Different Kind of Empire

One of the common assertions of writers on "Biblical politics" (a pretty good example here) is that all world history is a struggle between the humble poor of Israel vs. the whore of Babylon, the spiritual Egypt and we (the United States or the industrialized West) are the bad guys in the scenario. And indeed this has a lot of Biblical evidence to make it look pretty plausible. In the Old Testament, the small and weak nation of Israel is oppressed first by the Pharoah of Egypt, then by Assyria, then by Babylon, on into the Greeks and Romans. At the same time, the commercial city-states next to Israel, Tyre and Sidon, are compared to prostitutes corrupting the nations of the earth with their luxuries. See that pattern enough and you start to assume the world power is always setting itself up for well-merited destruction.

The book of Daniel is the locus classicus here. In the book of Daniel, chapters 2 and 7, we see the power of the empires, summed up as four metals and four beasts: gold/a lion (Babylon), silver/a bear (Perso-Median empire; the three ribs are her conquests of Lydia, Babylon, and Egypt; the bear has a hump because the Persians prevailed over the Medes), bronze/a leopard (Greece; the four wings and heads are Ptolemey, Seleucus, Antigonus, and Lysimachus who divided up Alexander’s empire), and iron/a ten-horned beast (Rome). In the book of Revelation, this prophetic denunciation is recapitulated and summed up as the beast from the sea (the Roman empire as the sum of all empires), the beast out of the earth (the priests of the deified Caesar as the sum of all idolatry), and the whore of Babylon (the wealth of Rome as the sum of all commercial wealth). All persecute the church and Israel, but the beast will attack and plunder the whore (the earliest precursor of this being Nebuchadnezzar attacking Tyre in Ezekiel 26-28), before being thrown with the false prophet into the lake of fire at the end of time.

So it is easy enough on Biblical grounds to divide the world into two sorts of states: the weak and poor on the one hand, and the possessors of political and commercial power on the other. The former are the godly good guys, the latter are the idolatrous oppressors. Everything neat and tidy.

However, in the Bible's actual history books, there is another kind of empire in Israel’s history. The Persian empire began with Cyrus being moved by the Lord to proclaim liberty to Israel. This is what Cyrus king of Persia says in his decree:

YHWH, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Anyone of his people among you -- may YHWH his God be with him and let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of YHWH, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem. And the people of any place where survivors may now be living are to provide him with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, and with freewill offerings for the temple of God in Jerusalem. (2 Chronicles 36:23; Ezra 1:2-4).

Cyrus proceeded to return all the articles belonging to the temple and entrust them to Sheshbazzar. It is not surprising that Isaiah prophesied about Cyrus in these words:

He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid (44:28) . . . Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; ‘I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron and I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel. For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me. I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else. . . . I have raised [Cyrus] up in righteousness, and I will direct all his ways: he shall build my city, and he shall let go my captives, not for price nor reward, saith the LORD of hosts. (45:1-13)

That God works through empires who knew Him not is nothing new; Assyria was God’s rod to punish Israel (Is. 10:5ff.) and Babylon was His agent as well (Jer. 27, among many others). What is striking here is that: 1) God works mercy through a conquering empire, not wrath, and 2) that God gives no sign of any plan to rebuke the instrument of His mercy.

This strongly "pro-Persian" impression is only strengthened in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Yes, the exiles have problems in Ezra 4-6, but the provocateurs are the "peoples of the land," the melange of Levantine neighbors, fooling Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes with false reports about the Jews. Eventually in Artaxerxes’s reign, first Ezra and then Nehemiah are granted high privileges, including rich gifts from the king’s treasury to the "God of heaven," immunity from taxation, and jurisdiction for the Jerusalem priesthood over all Jews (Ezra 7:17-26; 8:25-27) and an armed escort and permission and timbers to rebuild the city wall and gates for Nehemiah (2:7-9). In Nehemiah, the Jewish leader and the Persian king have a particularly close relationship. While Nehemiah is frightened when Artaxerxes accuses him of being sad at court (all those at court were supposed to be have glad faces to cheer up the king), Artaxerxes responds in a kindly and generous manner when Nehemiah tells him that it’s the troubles of Zion that have got him down (Neh. 2: 1-9).

Even more striking is the religious relationship clearly at work between these religious Jews and the Zoroastrian Persian kings. The two sides find common ground in acknowledging the authority of the "God of Heaven", used by Cyrus (Ezra 1:2), Darius (Ezra 6:9-10), Artaxerxes (Ezra 7:12, 21, 23), whose authority the Persian king himself accepts (see esp. Ezra 7:23). When speaking to the Persians, Ezra and Nehemiah and the other Jews themselves used this otherwise not particularly common epithet for their God YHWH (Ezra 5:12, 6:9, Neh. 1:4-5, 2:4, 20; cf. Daniel 2, and Jonah 1:9). Artaxerxes was evidently impressed by Ezra’s confident of the God of Heaven’s protection for the Jews (Ezra 8:22-23), although Nehemiah didn’t take such chances (Neh. 2:9). Darius expected the temple in Jerusalem to offer prayer for the king and his sons (Ezra 6:9-10) and Artaxerxes worried that interrupting this sacrifice might put the kingdom at risk of divine wrath (Ezra 7:23). Knowing as we do, that the Persian monarchy espoused Zoroastrianism and looked to Ahura Mazda as their all-powerful protector, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion not only that the Persian kings identified YHWH with Ahura Mazda, using the neutral term "God of Heaven", but that Ezra and Nehemiah were at any not at pains to disabuse the Persian monarchs of this notion. Receiving Artaxerxes’s edict that he will in fact pay for the daily sacrifices at the temple in exchange for prayers for his kingdom, Ezra exclaims:

Blessed be the LORD God of our fathers, which hath put such a thing as this in the king's heart, to beautify the house of the LORD which is in Jerusalem (7:27).

Finally, there is a massive bit of negative evidence. Not a single prophet writing before the fall of the Persian empire announces any doom to Persia. No blessing of those who dash her brats against the wall, no celebratory cry of "fallen, fallen is Persia the Great!", no forcing of the Medes and Persians to drink the wine of God’s wrath, no exultation that even now God’s whistles for Macedonians and summons them from the west and render Susa desolate, a haunt for jackals and owls. Nothing like that at all in Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the three literary prophets of the Persian era.

If the Jews from 535 to 325 BC loved Persia and her kings so much, why has that made such little impact on searchers for "Biblical politics"? I would submit that it is the effect of the still Greek-centered view of the ancient Near East. In Greece, the Persian kings were the very emblem of despotism, who dragged all of Asia out to attack the Greek city states, who only barely rescued themselves in 480 BC (cf. Daniel 11:2). Readers from the Hellenistic era to today bred on tales of Leonidas heroically dying at Thermopylae for liberty and law as he battles the endless ranks of Persia’s degraded slave soldiers serving the mad whims of a luxurious despot would hardly be receptive to the favorable portrait of Persia seen in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Isaiah. That the Persian empire is, above all others, rightly despised by God's people as an oriental despotism would seem only axiomatic.

But then the Jews had their own issues with the Greeks. Back in the time of the divided kingdom, before the Persians had ever appeared, the Lord spoke through Joel about them, charging the nations:

They have cast lots for my people; and have given a boy for an harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they might drink. Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Sidon, and all the coasts of Palestine? will ye render me a recompence? and if ye recompense me, swiftly and speedily will I return your recompence upon your own head; Because ye have taken my silver and my gold, and have carried into your temples my goodly pleasant things: The children also of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye sold unto the Greeks, that ye might remove them far from their border.

This accusation of the Greeks as above all slavers trafficking in human flesh continues in Ezekiel 27. Denouncing Tyre, the Lord speaks through him (vv. 13-19):

Greece, Tubal, and Meshech [two peoples in eastern Anatolia], they were thy merchants: they traded the persons of men and vessels of brass in thy market. . . . Dan also and Greece going to and fro occupied in thy fairs: bright iron, cassia, and calamus, were in thy market. (The word translated Greece here, Javan, is the Hebrew form of Ionia, the main sub-ethnic group of Greeks in Anatolia and the islands).

And in the time of the Persian empire, Zechariah made it clear where Judah stood in the emerging Greco-Persian dispute, as he looked forward to a great day (9:13):

When I have bent Judah for me, filled the bow with Ephraim, and raised up thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece, and made thee as the sword of a mighty man.

Greek hatred of Persia influences our reading of the Bible to this day. In a Bible study on Esther at our church, the study guide made much of the Persian monarch as a lecherous and despotic tyrant. At key points, the study guide quoted the Greek historian Herodotus’s famous legends about Xerxes, flogging the waters of the Hellespont for daring to make waves that overthrew his pontoon bridge for example. (A Persianist colleague of mine laments how this legend still colors his students' attitude to anything Iranian.) This same effort by Hellenistic Jews to darken his reputation can be seen in comparing the Apocryphal additions to Esther to the original text.

Here is the original description of Esther’s climactic meeting with the Persian monarch (chapter 5:1ff):

On the third day Esther put on her royal robes and stood in the inner court of the palace, in front of the king's hall. The king was sitting on his royal throne in the hall, facing the entrance. When he saw Queen Esther standing in the court, he was pleased with her and held out to her the gold scepter that was in his hand. So Esther approached and touched the tip of the scepter. Then the king asked, "What is it, Queen Esther? What is your request? Even up to half the kingdom, it will be given you."

Despite all previous her fears that in coming without being summoned she risks the king’s displeasure, the king is instantly kind and affable, willing from the first to give her what she wants. The parallel with Nehemiah 2 is close; the servant's fear of the king's wrath proves groundless. Note too that the description of her appearance is quite restrained; no effort to heighten her erotic attractions is alluded to. She wears the royal robes appropriate to her status and that is all.

Here by contrast is the Greek version, edited by Jews soaked in the Hellenistic environment of contempt for Persia and all things Persian that followed Alexander’s vengeful conquest of the Persian empire (chap. 15):

And upon the third day, when she had ended her prayers, she laid away her mourning garments, and put on her glorious apparel. And being gloriously adorned, after she had called upon God, who is the beholder and saviour of all things, she took two maids with her: And upon the one she leaned, as carrying herself daintily and the other followed, bearing up her train. And she was ruddy through the perfection of her beauty, and her countenance was cheerful and very amiable: but her heart was in anguish for fear. Then having passed through all the doors, she stood before the king, who sat upon his royal throne, and was clothed with all his robes of majesty, all glittering with gold and precious stones; and he was very dreadful. Then lifting up his countenance that shone with majesty, he looked very fiercely upon her: and the queen fell down, and was pale, and fainted, and bowed herself upon the head of the maid that went before her. Then God changed the spirit of the king into mildness, who in a fear leaped from his throne, and took her in his arms, till she came to herself again, and comforted her with loving words and said unto her, "Esther, what is the matter? I am thy brother, be of good cheer: Thou shalt not die, though our our commandment be general: come near. And so be held up his golden sceptre, and laid it upon her neck, And embraced her, and said, Speak unto me. Then said she unto him, I saw thee, my lord, as an angel of God, and my heart was troubled for fear of thy majesty. For wonderful art thou, lord, and thy countenance is full of grace. And as she was speaking, she fell down for faintness. Then the king was troubled, and all his servants comforted her.

Every trope of "oriental despotism" is brought in: the erotic as the only way to the heart of the tyrant ("carrying herself daintily . . . ruddy through perfection of her beauty"), the tyrant’s luxury ("all glittering with gold and precious stones"), his immediate tendency to irrational and capricious anger ("he looked very fiercely upon her"), the degradation of the subjects in court ceremonial ("he laid the sceptre on her neck").

One need not add here the various later and of course completely groundless Midrashic elaborations, such as that Xerxes sought to have Vashti come to his feasting wearing only a crown (cf. Esther 1:11; a version illustrated in this Jewish comic book here; hat tip to Dissonant Bible, whose take on the Persian monarch I obviously disagree with). One can simply say, back at the time when the Jews had to actually live under the Persians they viewed things very differently.

So where does that leave us?

1) Not every world power is an oppressive empire in the Bible. World powers can liberate, as well as enslave. The decrees of world-straddling superpowers can be animated by God’s mercy as well as His wrath.

2) Ezra and Nehemiah, like the prophet Jonah (cf. 1:9 and passim), without falling into universalism, found a way to communicate with men of different religions in a way that acknowledged some common understanding of the "God of the heavens" as the creator, who seats and deposes every monarch and through them shows wrath and mercy in proportion.

3) Tiny little ethnic groups in some dump of a country disliked by all their neighbors for their nutty religious customs can be won over by even small acts of kindness and mercy. And one can never tell exactly which one of those tiny little parochial people with strange food laws will write the books that writers will be commenting on in some unimaginable communication medium two and a half millenia from now.

4) Yet relations between the "little people" and the empire are always three-cornered: the "little people" and their traditional neighbors/enemies competing for the favor of the imperial nation. In this game, every one's ultimate loyalty is to their own people. Yes, affection can subsist, but it is fragile and easily derailed when the "other guys" get the ear of the imperial nation's leaders (cf. Tattenai in Ezra, Sanballat and Tobijah in Nehemiah, and Haman in Esther).

3) Finally, even with all the good done by the Persian kings to the people of God, that good was easily forgotten and their names blackened and slandered once the Persian kings had been overthrown by the new masters of the hour. The evil that men do, or even didn’t do, lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

If America is the new world empire, all of these lessons are worth remembering.