Purim and the Esther Scroll(s)
Esther - Kristin Joachimsen
Joanna Homrighausen [+]
College of William & Mary
Description
As early as the Mishnah (ca. 10–220 CE), rabbinic tradition has held that Purim’s central event is the act of reading from an Esther scroll. From that time onward, Jews have ritualized the materiality, copying, liturgical use of the məgillat (scroll of) Esther more than any other biblical book outside the Torah. This contribution shows how the material life of the Esther scroll, and the ways Jewish tradition has imagined, created, copied, and ritualized it, form a crucial part of the life of the book of Esther in Jewish tradition. The first section of the article contains an examination of the place of the Esther scroll in the Jewish bibliographic imagination. Here I reveal how rabbinic sources conflate Esther with various written texts described in the book, including the Persian royal chronicles (2:23, 6:1) and the Purim letters penned by Esther and Mordecai (9:20–32). This conflation enables Jews to blur the line between two acts of writing: the imagined ancient authoring of the scroll and the contemporary copying of the scroll. This blurring also allows the scroll used in synagogue liturgy to connect congregants to the heroes of the story in a material, immediate way. Further, I show how the scroll’s ambiguous role as both book (sēper) and letter (‘iggeret) (as in b. Meg. 19a) plays out in halakhic conversations around how the Esther scroll has some, but not all, of the Torah scroll’s sanctity. By connecting the məgillat Esther to the sēper Torah, rabbis can place the Esther scroll in discourses around heavenly books and revealed writings. In the second section, I turn to actual scrolls, which are first attested only in the medieval era. Here, the focus is not on textual criticism but on various kinds of paratexts found in Esther scrolls. I first discuss the scribal midrashim (commentaries), such as the special layout of the ten sons of Haman, the practice of beginning every column of the scroll with ha-melek, and customs of enlarging certain letters to insert the name of God into the scroll. Each of these paratexts, I argue, reflects and generates new interpretations of the biblical text. I then turn to the tradition of illustrated məgillôt, which provide a window into visual midrashic traditions, inner biblical typologies, and ways in which Jews read the book of Esther into their own cultural settings. Overall, I hope to show that when it comes to Esther and its scroll form in synagogue liturgy, the medium really is the message. The way in which Jewish tradition conceives of the Esther scroll, creates the scroll, and displays the scroll in liturgy all open windows into significant aspects of how the book of Esther lives in Jewish tradition.