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Accession Days and Holidays: The Origins of the Jewish Festival of Purim

2009; Society of Biblical Literature; Volume: 128; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/25610170

1934-3876

Jona Schellekens,

Mormonism, Religion, and History

Political elites use not only direct force but also ritual to bolster their authority.1 The use of ritual is very old and includes examples such as the cult of the Roman emperor, which some now believe is what held the Roman Empire together in the absence of a credible military threat.2 The celebration of holidays is one way that elites use ritual to construct political legitimacy for a dynasty or the nationstate.3 Thus, Roman emperors had their accession days- dies imperii- that were celebrated annually. In England, accession days were not celebrated until about 1570, when the government of Queen Elizabeth I encouraged prayer and festivity on November 17, the anniversary of the queen's accession, in order to bind the nation to the ruling dynasty.4 Republics have replaced accession days with days commemorating the founding of the government; thus, France exchanged dynastic celebrations for the annual holiday of July 14, or Bastille Day.5 The Romans did not invent the celebration of accession days. There is evidence for the annual celebration of the accession day of at least one Achaemenid king- the Persian festival of Magophonia. This festival in fact celebrated the accession of Darius (522-486 b.c.e.), because it commemorated the victory of Darius over a competitor to the throne, marking the beginning of a new, although perhaps distantly related, dynasty.6 In this essay, I argue that Purim originally celebrated the accession day of Mordecai the Jew. Modern Jewish liturgy gives, as the main justification for the festival of Purim, the salvation of the Jews in the Persian Empire during the rule of Xerxes (486-465 b.c.e.). Most biblical researchers, however, doubt that Purim originally celebrated a military victory; they prefer instead a pagan origin for the festival. I question both the traditional etiology and the pagan origins of Purim. My reading of the book of Esther using modern techniques of literary analysis will attempt to show that the salvation of the Jews is used to justify the accession of Mordecai and that Mordecai, rather than Esther, is therefore the principal hero, in spite of the name of the book.7 If this is correct, then Purim may originally have been an annual celebration of the accession of Mordecai. There are many theories about the origin of the festival of Purim. Some scholars consider the festival to be pagan in origin, and they suspect that Jews adopted it from their Babylonian or Persian neighbors during the exile. Ever since scholars equated Mordecai and Esther with the Babylonian gods Marduk and Ishtar, the theory of a Babylonian origin of Purim has been popular.8 Some commentators seek the origins of Purim in the Babylonian New Year, which was celebrated in the month of Nissan. The casting of lots was one of the major foci of the celebration of the Babylonian New Year.9 Almut Hintze is the most recent proponent of the derivation of the festival and its name from the Persian feast of Fravardigan.10 Hermann Gunkel suggested that Purim is a Jewish imitation of the Persian festival identified by Herodotus (3.68-79) as Magophonia, which, as noted above, celebrated the victory of Darius over a competitor to the throne.11 Gillis Gerleman is one of the few scholars who thinks that the festival and its name originated among the Jews. He argues that Purim was instituted by Jews in exile to compete with the festival of Passover and that the story of Mordecai is based on that of Moses.12 Any discussion of the origins of Purim must be based on an analysis of the book of Esther, to which much of this essay is devoted. One of the difficulties in such an analysis is to determine as nearly as possible the original intention of the author(s). The methodology adopted here is intertextual analysis, using other biblical texts to clarify the meaning of the book of Esther. Essentially, this methodology consists of reading the book of Esther simultaneously with all other biblical stories alluded to in the book and noting similarities as well as differences. …