Writing to her husband John in a May 4, 1775 letter, Abigail Adams expressed her disdain for the “wretched” Loyalist former royal governor of Massachusetts Bay, Thomas Hutchinson. She wished upon him “the fate of Mordecai,” mistakenly swapping in the heroic Jewish figure in the biblical book of Esther for his nefarious foil, Haman, who, at story’s end, is hanged on the gallows he had prepared in order to kill Mordecai.
The Adamses were not the only Founders fond of the ancient tale in which the young Jewish woman Esther, after being taken to the palace of King Ahasuerus to be his queen, heroically risks her life at the urging of her cousin Mordecai to foil the wicked vizier’s plot to murder all the Jews after Mordecai refused to bow down to him. On December 17, 1778, then-General George Washington wrote to Joseph Reed, the newly elected president of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council: “I would to God that one of the most atrocious of each State was hung in Gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman.” Affinity for the Esther narrative has manifested well beyond its original Jewish readership—though, as in Abigail Adams’s bungled allusion, the details have oftentimes been muddled along the way.
Haman: A Biography, by Adam J. Silverstein, the Max Schloessinger Chair of Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, offers a reception history of the book through the framework of an academic fan-letter to its archvillain. Arguably the Bible’s second-most notorious antagonist, besides Pharaoh of “I will not let them go” fame, he has proven a malleable metaphor for varied audiences over centuries, and a useful portal of entry into understanding the central purpose of the tale in which he appears. “His impact over millennia has been enormous,” Silverstein argues, “making him one of history’s great overachievers,” serving as “a divisive figure both within religions (on account of stirring debates about his status), and between religions (as his name was used polemically, to denigrate rivals).” He is threaded through the Abrahamic faiths, and a prism through which they “share with us their fears, worries, frustrations, and hopes by expressing their thoughts about Haman, each in their own way.”
In the opening pages, the author notes, Esther’s “story was retold and reimagined time and time again, far more than most biblical narratives.” Readers have long been regaled by the palace intrigue of a humble young woman’s courageous maneuvering to prevent the slaughter of her kinsmen. So much so that they tried to, in their eyes, make it even better—with mixed results.
In ancient times, anonymous Jewish scholars translating the book into Greek inserted prayers in the mouths of the Jewish characters they felt were missing in the canonical original. For other ancient sages, in traditions collected into what are called midrashim, the book was understood to be yet another iteration of the Jewish people surviving evil forces throughout history that sought their destruction. These rabbis suggested that the conniving snake in the Garden of Eden was a prefiguring of Ahasuerus’s malevolent advisor thousands of years later. Haman, to them, was the evil inclination in human form, which must be defeated for humanity to be fully free.
Early Christians, emerging from the Jewish community that to this day celebrates the holiday of Purim in commemoration of Mordecai and Esther’s ultimate triumph, also encountered the book, but were hesitant to embrace it. As Isaac Kalimi, the author of The Book of Esther between Judaism and Christianity (not cited by Silverstein), has summarized, “At best Esther has a marginal place within Christian religion, theology, and culture which has tended to assess the book quite negatively.” The Book of Esther is never quoted in the New Testament, and early Christians debated including it in their canon at all. The first extant Christian commentary on the text was not written until the ninth century. Later Christian skepticism toward Esther has been well-documented. Though he continued to include Esther in the canon, Martin Luther clearly did not think highly of it, and he weaved that low opinion into the antisemitic commentary that exploded late in his life.
The current volume’s attempt to find echoes of Haman, and the Book of Esther as a whole, in the Christian textual tradition unsurprisingly proves to be a challenge. Silverstein suggests John 19, in which Jesus is portrayed “wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe,” is an intertextual allusion to Mordecai’s triumphant emergence after Haman’s defeat “in royal robes of blue and white, with a magnificent crown of gold and a mantle of fine linen and purple wool” (Esther 8:15). But Silverstein struggles to make sense of his own observation. Perhaps Jesus is a new Mordecai, he posits, “Just as Mordecai’s elevation represents an apex of success and prestige, the inversion of the language when describing Jesus’s passion represents a nadir.” Then again, Silverstein wonders, maybe Jesus is a new Haman: “Jesus was crucified in lieu of Barabbas, just as Haman was crucified in lieu of Mordecai; and both were executed after having been falsely accused.” While his Gospel is not particularly friendly to “the Jews,” the idea that John would portray Jesus, who lived and died as a Jew, as the second coming of a Jew-hating genocidist, and sympathetically so, seems more than a stretch.
In another unconvincing attempt to find echoes of Esther in the New Testament, Silverstein notes that Jesus’s words on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (a quotation from the Hebrew Bible’s Psalm 22) is attributed in the Babylonian Talmud (composed three to four centuries after the New Testament) to Esther herself, as she trepidatiously approached Ahasuerus’s throne room to advocate on behalf of her people. “It is possible,” Silverstein offers, that the Talmudic sage who suggested the Psalm’s verse was composed by Esther, “was influenced by an ancient pre-Christian tradition about Esther’s self-sacrificing approach to the king,” which, goes Silverstein’s theory, Jesus was then alluding to when he said his last words. This strains credulity.
The Book of Esther reflects the power of unexpected heroes and heroines to risk their lives in defense of their liberties.
In analyzing Muslim traditions about Esther, Silverstein points out that Haman is mentioned six times in the Quran. Strangely, for those well-versed in the Hebrew Bible, however, the character appears in the context not of Ahasuerus of Susa in Persia, but of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. The Quranic Pharaoh asks Haman to build a tower made of bricks baked from clay, which seems to be a mash-up of Genesis’s Tower of Babel story—but in Egypt, in the time of Moses. This places the Quran with a figure, who, per the Hebrew Bible (which was composed over a thousand years before the birth of Muhammad) lived around 700 years after Pharaoh of the Exodus’s fame, and over 1,300 miles away. Esther and Mordecai, mind you, are not mentioned in the Quran’s account. Haman in the Quranic context exists as a foil for God, opposing Moses’s call for monotheism.
In attempting to explain how Haman shows up in the wrong time and place, repeating a theory from his earlier volume Veiling Esther, Unveiling Her Story: The Reception of a Biblical Book in Islamic Lands, Silverstein suggests that “Haman” was possibly confused by Muhammad with Haran, who Genesis lists as a brother of Abraham. Thus, the Quran placed this “Haman” in a Genesis-era setting, Egypt, not in Abraham’s time period, but rather in Moses’s.
In a bizarre attempt to integrate the Islamic version with Jewish interpretive tradition, Silverstein tries to propose a thread of the Jewish tradition that also saw Haman as existing independent of the Esther story, as an enemy of God. To do so, he cites a Jewish prayer recited on the holiday of Purim, which contains the line praising God for Haman’s defeat: “You, in Your abounding mercies, foiled his council and frustrated his intention.” Unfortunately for Silverstein, that short prayer begins with the line: “In the days of Mordecai and Esther, in Susa the capitol, when the wicked Haman rose up against them and sought to destroy and annihilate all the Jews, young and old, children and women.” Support for his attempt to prove an Islamic-style Esther-free Haman character somewhere in Judaism requires sundering a beloved prayer recited by millions of Jews for hundreds of years.
Silverstein, throughout the work, makes his affinity for the archvillain explicitly clear, a particularly bizarre perspective in light of the recent bloody struggle Israel waged with today’s Persians, the Iranians. Even putting aside the contemporary resonance, Silverstein’s fandom for the mastermind of a plot to murder his ancestors, perhaps meant to be tongue-in-cheek or some sort of marketing strategy, strikes one as quite literally self-defeating. “An objective reader … cannot but empathize with Haman,” Silverstein effuses. “His rivalry with a particular Jew, and by extension all Jews, appears motivated and strangely reasonable, for it is he who loyally and consistently executes the king’s orders, even at great emotional expense, while the Jew(s) refused to do the same. He is the victim of … more than one miscarriage of justice.” The horror! An antisemitic mass-murder motivated by one individual Jew’s disrespect put motivation, reason, and emotion into trying to kill millions of that individual’s coreligionists, wasn’t able to do it, and then was duly punished. Poor Haman!
Whether Israeli soldiers who have been risking their lives in defense of Israel after Hamas’ Iran-backed slaughter on October 7, 2023, or the millions of Israeli civilians who have lived through two years of Iranian and Houthi ballistic rocket attacks that have thankfully largely been foiled by Israel’s Iron Dome might be sympathetic to the claim that Haman, who organized a genocidal attempt to wipe Jews off the map and whose name they stomp at the sound on in synagogues on Purim was unfairly punished because after all, he didn’t kill anybody, I leave to them. Speaking as one such Israeli civilian, I possess no such sympathy, let alone “empathy.”
Speaking of Jewish interpreters of Esther, Silverstein notes how the story found particularly devoted readers among conversos, Jews who outwardly practiced as Christians while avoiding the Inquisition, as Esther had operated as a Persian Queen, hiding her Jewish identity. Silverstein does not mention the American Founders’ fascination with the Book of Esther.
Another Israeli academic, Eran Shalev, by contrast, has written, both in his American Zion and my own edited volume, Esther in America, on the many citations of the book by preachers and the press during the years immediately preceding the American Revolution. Nor does Silverstein note Abraham Lincoln’s citations of the book in the nineteenth century. In these contexts, the Book of Esther reflects the power of unexpected heroes and heroines to risk their lives in defense of their liberties. In times both ancient and modern, that has been to practice as proud Jews, or, in the case of the Founders and Lincoln, as Americans who saw themselves as biblical Israel reborn. Both groups sought to imitate Mordecai and Esther’s coreligionists in achieving triumph over tyranny.
He does note, however, that in the twentieth century, the Nazis self-identified with Haman, an analogy that global Jewry, including American, surely agreed with. Julius Streicher, the convicted war criminal, wrote in a 1939 essay, “When they mention ‘Haman’ in the synagogues they think of Hitler.” Streicher even shouted “Purimfest!” as he was led to the gallows for his execution at Nuremberg.
“Different Esthers, refracted through different interpretive lenses,” Silverstein writes, “produced different Hamans.” Haman: A Biography is a testament, then, to the timeless allure of both biblical interpretation and misinterpretation.