Pass Interference
It happened in the days of Ahasuerus—that Ahasuerus who reigned over a hundred and twenty-seven provinces from India to Ethiopia. Esther 1:1 JPS
It happened – Some time ago we investigated the Hebrew phrase miqreh (see Today’s Word on Ruth 2:3).[1] It’s used for “happy accidents,” accidents that are really somehow orchestrated by the invisible hand of God but appear to us to be no more than coincidence. It is the closest Hebrew gets to the idea of fate.
Knowing about miqreh you might expect that whenever you find the translation “it happened” you would encounter this underlying Hebrew word. But in this verse, no translator tells you that miqreh is not the Hebrew word. The Hebrew word here is hāyâ, the verb for “to be, become, exist” and “happen.” Here the verb is a waw-consecutive plus imperfect. You remember that construction, right? The one found in Genesis 3:10 where Adam expresses in trans-temporal fear.[2] In essence, this opening verb suggests that the story is a continuous one.
That raises an interesting question. Is this history or is it something else? Adele Berlin offers some insight:
“We expect a biblical book to be serious and its message to be congruent with the message of other biblical books as they have been interpreted by the tradition. Moshe Halbertal has made this point most recently, with specific reference to Song of Songs and Esther. As he observes, the canonical status of Song of Songs deters us from reading it as an erotic love poem and compels the reading of it as a metaphor for the relationship between God and Israel. The same is true of Esther, which Halbertal notes, ‘is not the canonization of a comedy about courtly life in a kingdom of Persia’—by which he means that Esther is in fact a comedy but that as part of the canon it was not seen as such in Jewish tradition. Halbertal concludes, ‘Paradoxically, then, the canonization of a work sometimes serves to suppress its most plausible reading.’”[3]
Isn’t Halbertal’s analysis so true? The very fact that these stories are in the Bible, canonized, authorized, the source of our confidence in God, makes them serious. After all, God doesn’t laugh, right? All of the Bible material is about your eternal destiny. If you don’t get it right, you’ll perish—either in Hell or She’ol. How could God possibly allow a comedy, a tongue-in-cheek play, in Scripture? Berlin goes on to say: “We cannot appreciate the story fully unless we realize that it is meant to be funny.”[4] But have we ever read it that way? Have we ever noticed all of the “impossible” circumstances, “designed” coincidences, and deliberate story-telling characterizations in this book in the Bible!? Once more we are confronted with automatic, unconscious assumptions.
Unpacking the paradigm isn’t quite as simple as we thought.
Topical Index: it happened, miqreh, hāyâ, waw-consecutive, Genesis 3:10, Esther 1:1
[1] https://skipmoen.com/2011/11/the-random-universe/
[2] https://skipmoen.com/2018/10/the-future-past/
[3] Adele Berlin, The JPS Commentary: Esther, (The Jewish Publication Society, 2001), p. xviii.
[4] Ibid.
