BMCR 2009.05.39: Beckman on Dalley, Esther's Revenge at Susa. From Sennacherib to Abasuerus

Stephanie Dalley, Esther's Revenge at Susa. From Sennacherib to
Abasuerus.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007.  Pp. xvi, 262; maps
4, figs. 53.  ISBN 978-0-19-921663-5.  $99.00.

Reviewed by Gary Beckman, University of Michigan ([email protected])
Word count:  933 words
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The Book of Esther is perhaps the oddest work included within the canon
of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The story is set in Iranian
Susa--far away from ancient Israel and Judah, and the biblical God is
not mentioned even once in the text. Rather, we encounter a
folkloristic narrative in which a murderous plot against the Jews of
the Persian Empire is thwarted and turned back upon its originator
without the aid of divine intervention, solely through the efforts of a
virtuous, beautiful, and courageous woman. While there is still much
debate among practitioners of biblical studies as to the historical
veracity of many of the tales contained in the Books of the Pentateuch,
Samuel, and Kings, few outside of fundamentalist circles seriously
maintain that the widespread massacre of anti-Semites described at the
conclusion of the Book of Esther--and mentioned in no independent
ancient source--actually took place. And it was already recognized more
than a century ago that the names of the protagonists of the work,
Esther and her uncle Mordecai, are not ordinary Hebrew personal
designations, but rather mutations of the names of the Mesopotamian
divinities Ishtar (goddess of love and war) and Marduk (patron deity of
the city of Babylon).

In this ambitious book, Stephanie Dalley, a cuneiform scholar from
Oxford, sets herself the task of explaining just how this work came
into being and why it entered the sacred literature of the Jews. She is
well prepared to tackle this problem, having over the past decade
devoted particular attention in her research to the precipitation of
Assyrian and Babylonian traditions in both Classical Greek and biblical
sources, discussing, for example, the "Hanging Gardens of Babylon,"
Semiramis, and the wives of Sargon II of Assyria (see bibliography, pp.
230-31).

Dalley's key insight is that although the story is set in the court of
the Achaemenid emperor "Ahasuerus" (= Artaxerxes?), the text reveals
the influence of the late Assyrian culture of the seventh century
B.C.E. more strongly than that of the Persian civilization of the sixth
through fourth centuries (7-8, 181-82). Beyond details of vocabulary
and material culture, this is manifest in the very prominence of the
heroine. We know of few important women in the upper echelons of
Persian society, while the Assyrian queens Sammu-ramat (ninth-eighth
centuries) and Naqia (sixth century) exercised real power, if
indirectly through their husbands and sons (133-35).

In order to support her argumentation regarding the Assyrian background
of Esther, Dalley presents a concise sketch of the history of Assyria
under the Sargonid kings (chapters 1-4; see also the genealogical
chart, p. xvi). These hundred or so pages constitute an engaging and
up-to-date introduction to the events of this period in Western Asia
and Egypt and are to be recommended to the general reader curious about
happenings in the east at the time of the rise of the Greek polis. In
this section of the book, Dalley's reconstruction of events,
exemplified by her indictment of Esarhaddon as a co-conspirator in the
murder of his father Sennacherib (37-40), is judicious and on the whole
convincing.

But in reimagining the process through which Assyrian rulers, deities,
cult, and the events affecting them were transmuted into the elements
of the Hebrew tale as we know it, Dalley is necessarily on less secure
ground.  In a nutshell, she speculates that in Assyrian religion,
significant historical incidents could be translated to the divine
plane, incorporated into mythology, and reenacted in turn by humans in
ritual, as documented in the obscure Akkadian-language liturgical
scripts known to scholars as "Cultic Commentaries" (113-20). In
particular, Dalley further postulates that the wars of Assurbanipal
against the Elamites, whose capital was at Susa, were reflected in a
festival of Ishtar of Nineveh (156).  Consequently, the cultic calendar
pertaining to this avatar of the goddess and various elements of her
worship were passed on in oral and written tradition after the fall of
Assyria, to reappear in altered form in the story of Esther. The
resultant narrative entered the lore of the Jews as an aetiology for
the festival of purim "lots," the etymology of whose designation
unquestionably points to an Assyrian origin (167).

It is not possible to summarize adequately Dalley's argument in a few
sentences. Suffice it to say that, given its complexity and the
exiguous nature of the available evidence, each reader will react to
this scenario according to his or her own standards of proof. As the
author herself admits, "no direct descent can be claimed with certainty
for any one detail" of the Book of Esther (162). As one of skeptical
bent, I personally would render a verdict here of "not proven."

>From my own viewpoint as a Hittitologist, I must in particular make the
following critical observations: There is no indication in the Hittite
sources that the pastries featured in the rites of Ishtar of Nineveh
represented her defeated enemies (153). Furthermore, I am unaware of
any incident in the mythology of Hatti in which a god consumes the
flesh of a slain enemy (153; cf. the discussion of "sublimated
cannibalism" on p. 188). Perhaps Dalley has misremembered the passage
in the "Kingship in Heaven" in which Kumarbi swallows the genitalia of
his displaced predecessor Anu. Finally, it is questionable whether the
practice of referring to the beneficiary in a generic ritual text as
"so-and-so" (analogous to our "fill in the blank") would lead to the
replacement of one king by another in a historical narrative, a
different genre altogether (131-32).

That said, Dalley has produced an intriguing and thought-provoking book
that will be read with pleasure by cuneiformists, biblicists, and
classicists alike.