Dark Esther

My new project Behind Ancient Bars looks at several prominent incarceration stories in the Hebrew Bible. One that is often missed is Esther’s stint at Ahasuerus’s harem. Because most of the story is a bedroom farce, and some of it a bloodthirsty schadenfreude fest, many commentators skip over Esther’s confinement before she is taken to the king, which you can find in Chapter 2. But this short vignette illuminates not only commentary about empire in general (and probably Persian empire in particular), but also about the multiple forms of vulnerability of women and the ways in which governmental systems are crafted to exploit these vulnerabilities. This paints the festive Esther story a much darker, more sinister hue.

Seeing the Esther story as an incarceration story to begin with requires doing what modern penologists do on the regular: expanding our definition of incarceration. I find it interesting that people who happily read Foucault and Goffman, seeing obvious parallels and symmetries among total institutions and across the carceral archipelago, suddenly adopt a hyper-legalistic approach to punishment in antiquity, forcefully arguing that there is no incarceration in the bible because it is not listed as a sanction for a criminal conviction in Deuteronomy or in Hammurabi’s law. If incarceration scholarship in modernity can look at pretrial detention, immigration detention, and even cattle towns–because those are carceral experiences–then incarceration scholarship in antiquity can and should encompass political detention and shady government programs for locking up and reeducating children. And indeed, some commentary on the Book of Esther moves away from the entertaining popular presentations of beauty pageants to identifying incarceration elements.

How much of this represents true carceral practices, or is a realistic portrayal of royal harems, is hotly debated. Summarizing the literature for and against a reading of Esther as fiction, Adele Berlin opines that the story, like the Daniel story, dates to the Hellenistic period, and reflects stereotypical Athenian perceptions of Persia: “luxury, hierarchy, bureaucracy, wine drinking, the postal system, imperial law, bowing down, eunuchs, impalement, a royal garden, and a sexually virtuous queen.” But at least some of this fed commentators who used it to glean more about imperial Persian governmentality.

The background to the Esther story is well known: during a royal feast with his courtiers, an inebriated king orders his queen, Vashti, to appear before the courtiers. She refuses, angering the king, and is either banished or executed, which results in a vacancy. The king’s servants propose that all good looking virgins in the kingdom be gathered at the “women’s house” in Shushan, the capital, under the supervision of Hege, the king’s eunuch, so that the king may pick whichever one pleases him to be his queen in lieu of Vashti.

Julia Schwartzmann points out that the details of Esther’s arrival in the harem can be disturbing to modern readers, because of Mordechai and Esther’s “ambiguous uncle/niece relationship, the way Mordechai hands over Esther to the king’s harem, and his manipulative handling of his silent and passive niece.” Not only modern readers: Two important medieval commentators, Abraham Ibn Ezra and Immanuel of Rome, propose that Mordechai planned, as a foster parent, to marry his beautiful charge, a-la Dickens character John Jarndyce (his charge in the book, you’ll remember, is also called Esther!) One can only imagine many young women and girls in similarly precarious situations who would end up swept into the harem–a rather hopeless prospect, as only one girl would be officially crowned queen, and as no girl, per Ibn Ezra, would be available for marriage or any life outside the harem after having bedded the king–with girls like Esther, without parents and with guardians who have agendas beyond their charges’ best interests, more vulnerable to apprehension and lockdown.

The pageant story will have us believe that the girls gathered at the capital out of their own free will, but some commentators see this more as a coercive executive action. Shelom Esther draws the readers’ attention to the large number of officers and bureaucrats involved in the concubine-gathering operation, which had to visit each house to prevent parents from hiding their daughters. Joseph Ibin Yahya adds that Mordechai hid Esther, and that she was taken against his will and against hers.

The administration of the harem, as we saw in the Daniel court stories, is given to eunuchs. The word “saris” (eunuch) might be used differently in different biblical contexts, and could be a reference to a high government official rather than to the sexuality of these personages, but what we know of various empires–especially the Persian empire–suggests that, at least in some contexts, the meanings converge. Last week, at our archaeology course, Brett Kaufman told us that it was common to entrust military commands in imperial armies to eunuchs because they would have no dynastic aspirations and thus would not attempt to usurp the throne. But it makes sense that confinement operations, where sexual exploitation is a serious risk, would be entrusted to sexually inactive supervisors, as 19th century commentator Malbim very explicitly explains.

Even if sexual abuse was not a risk, there were other ways to render the eunuchs’ charges pliable and docile. Much is made in chapter 2 of the issue of cosmetics (“tamrukim”). Some commentators, like Ibn Yahya, interpret these in a straightforward way as beauty-enhancing products, while others, like Immanuel of Rome, thought these could be medications, including first-aid supplies. What is interesting is that the sole purveyors of these items were the eunuchs, which Malbim shrewdly interprets as part and parcel of the king’s power play which, in turn, reflects the lessons learned from the Vashti episode:

He feared that [the girl he would choose] would not want to marry him, and [his advisors] said that after they examined those who came willingly and did not find an appropriate wife for him, then he will appoint officers and they will round up all the girls with a strong arm, (and they even shrewdly said that he should appoint new officers, so that it would be someone who has not been bribed to ignore the rich people’s girls), and against the fear based on his memory, and the concern that [the prospective bride] would do as Vashti did, they advised to gather the girls around Hege, and that they must not bring their own cosmetics from home, but rather only receive them from the eunuchs, and from this side will always be submissive toward the Eunuch and not uppity as Vashti was.

Malbim on Esther 2: 3: 2

When Julia Schwarzmann marvels at how captivating the Esther story is given its telenovela-like synopsis, I want to add: the power of the story is that both ancient and modern readers would recognize the patriarchal fear of subversive and disobedience, the injured pride, the opportunities for exploitation and exertion of power. But it also points to a source of power and ingenuity on the part of the incarcerated person. We’ve already seen how Daniel, when failing to negotiate his diet with chief Eunuch Ashpenaz, makes a deal with “the waiter” on the sly to receive his special vegan rations. Here, we see Esther realizing that the key to surviving in the harem is to charm Hege, who proceeds to favor her with food and luxury items.

Another aspect of the story that exudes verisimilitude is Mordechai’s concern for Esther’s welfare–whether because of the general situation or because, at his request, she hid her identity from harem management. He is told to come to the harem yard every day to inquire after her, and perhaps one advantage of charming the pants off Hege was the availability of daily reports of her wellbeing.

By contrast to the later story of her tenure as queen, Esther of chapter 2 is described passively: she is beautiful, parentless, young, vulnerable, and puppeteered by her uncle/guardian as well as by the various government officials. But between the lines, one finds glimmers of transformation. Placed in a complicated logistical and social scenario, Esther figures out that personal charm and charisma are useful tools, and that performing modesty and restraint pays off. Both Ibn Ezra and Immanuel of Rome emphasize that her restraint, which earned her the favor of Hege, reflect her intelligence. Ibn Yahya opines that she had the good fortune to be taken to the king in the winter, when one enjoys intimacy and closeness more than in summer, thus improving the odds of being the king’s favorite, but what if Hege, who was in her corner, was the one in charge of the schedule and deliberately scheduled her sexual audition for an auspicious date? The emerging picture is one of strategic thinking, charming the key people responsible for her welfare, and performing royal virtue even prior to her selection (perhaps impressing Hege as “queen material”) which the story does not demonize or regard as duplicitous but rather as an understandable, even commendable, survival strategy.

This is interesting for two reasons. The first is that, regardless of the official goal of incarceration in biblical stories, there is evidence of personal transformation occurring behind bars. Martin Pritkin, who approaches biblical punishment from a more doctrinal perspective, finds evidence of rehabilitative motives amidst the retributive rationales, but I think these stories make a somewhat different point: there’s a difference between the espoused nature of a confinement program and the sociological and psychological features of the experience of going though said program. Second, and relatedly, personal transformations in incarceration stories are a means to an end. Notably, incarceration serves as a cauldron, a crucible, a vehicle, for developing leadership characteristics that predict the protagonist’s success at his or her post-incarceration life. Joseph, for example, is incarcerated as punishment for a wrongful accusation or to allow Potiphar and his household to save face; behind bars, however, he develops not only the administrative and logistics acumen that will later serve him well in Egyptian administration, but also a prosocial approach to dream interpretation and the skills of getting along with different kinds of people (skills he lacked as a youth). Daniel learns some wheeling and dealing and perhaps impresses Ashpenaz and “the waiter” with his initiative. Jeremiah, admittedly a “finished character” by the time of his incarceration, has an opportunity to flex against Zedekiah and to leverage his existing friendship with Ebed Melekh to obtain relief, as well as to forge an important alliance with Nebuchadnezzar that grants him relative freedom in exile. And Esther’s reputation for virtuousness and humility and capacity to marshal personal charm and good looks to make important friendships goes a long way toward earning the favor of the king, both at her audition and later, when her skills are needed at a time of national crisis. The dire straits of incarceration are an essential part of the formulaic, fatalistic narrative. Theologically, they support the idea that the divine jails these people to foster the development of the personal characteristics that will come in handy later. I don’t see this as being much different than the sort of logic I see and here at many a rehabilitation program in prisons–namely, the way people are encouraged to construct and tell a coherent personal narrative, in which the prison journey, the crucible of change, is an essential ingredient on the way up, and support for an “everything happens for a reason” notion of meaning-making.

There are two ways of looking at this–benign and cynical. The benign approach relies on Victor Frankl’s logotherapy to argue that people survive and thrive after suffering–even extreme suffering–by imbuing their experiences with meanings. Shadd Maruna’s Making Good offers many examples for the role that a personal narrative of hardship and redemption plays in desistance from reoffending. The more cynical approach, akin to the one I developed in Yesterday’s Monsters, is that rehabilitative programming becomes sort of a mediocre community play that has to follow a script that prison authorities and parole commissioners recognize and validate: follower-to-leader, toxic-thinking-to-empathy, anger-to-understanding, opacity-to-insight. These scripts have a quasi-theological flavor (in some cases, the programs that encourage them, such as Twelve Steps groups, actually have a religion component.) Whether or not the fatalism and meaning-making project is genuine or artificial, it is a well-recognized story, and so, these incarceration stories feel familiar and similar to each other because they evoke a recognizable, universally familiar trope.