STORY BOOKS: ESTHER, RUTH, JONAH
Besides the older and younger historical books we have been
considering, the Jewish Bible contains some examples of what we should
call the short story, and the church has preserved others. The
canonical books of this class are Esther, Ruth, and Jonah; among the
apocrypha are Judith and Tobit; others, such as 3 Maccabees, are found
in manuscripts of the Greek and Latin Bibles, or in Oriental
translations, but did not attain official recognition of any of the
great churches. These stories, which, as might be expected, differ
widely in literary quality as well as in subject and motive, are
doubtless only the rare survivors of a larger literature of this kind,
but they suffice to give us a notion of the popular reading of the
Jews in the last centuries before the Christian era. It would be more
exact, perhaps, to say the popular story-telling, for probably the
written books were chiefly used by the story-tellers, who reproduced
their contents orally and freely, just as the Moslem story-tellers
to-day recite stories from the Arabian Nights or the Antar romance.
Some of them, however, like Esther, attached themselves to popular
festivals and were recited or read as part of the celebration.
ESTHER.--Esther is the story of a beautiful Jewess of Susa whom Xerxes
raises from the ranks of his concubines to be his queen, and who uses
her influence over him to save her people from a general massacre
which the grand vizier has prepared for them by way of avenging an
affront from one of the race. The plot is developed with noteworthy
art. The deposition of Vashti, which, so far as the main matter goes,
is necessary only to make room for Esther, under the author's hand
becomes a brilliant first act. The embroilment of Mordecai and Haman
is skilfully managed; the stiffnecked Jew refuses homage to the proud
vizier, who schemes a generous revenge. Esther ventures her life for
her people by intruding into the audience chamber, but the
_dénouement_ is artfully retarded--instead of a pathetic plea for the
imperilled Jews, an invitation for the king and his prime minister to
a _petit dîner_ in the queen's apartments! At the banquet the king
offers Esther her wish, but again the issue is postponed. Haman, in
his elation at such signal marks of queenly favour, builds a gallows
for Mordecai seventy-five feet high--and next day has to parade the
streets of the capital at the bridle of the hated Jew's horse
proclaiming him the object of the king's special honour!
The scene in the banqueting hall when Esther at last makes her
petition is highly dramatic. She makes it a plea for her own life,
"for we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and
to perish." The king, who has no inkling that she is a Jewess, and is
incensed at the thought of such a plot against his queen, angrily
asks, "Who is he, and where is he, that durst presume in his heart to
do so?" The climax so skilfully prepared comes in the stunning words,
"This wicked Haman here!" Thenceforth the action matches swiftly: the
king bursts out of the room to collect himself by a turn in the
garden; the fallen vizier sinks a suppliant on the queen's couch,
where the king, returning, finds him; the sinister eunuch standing by
describes the fine new gallows Haman has at home, ready for Mordecai,
and on his own gallows, in poetic justice, Haman is hanged, fifty
cubits high! Mordecai succeeds to the seal of state, and conceives the
counter-stroke by which, instead of the heathen massacring the Jews,
the Jews slaughter the heathen. An annual festival celebrates the
joyful issue.
For the full account of Mordecai's greatness the reader is referred to
the royal annals of Media and Persia, where it will be found, he says,
recorded along with the mighty deeds of Xerxes, including his
subjugation of the Greeks. Despite this authority, it should be
unnecessary to say that the Book of Esther is a work of fiction.
Whether it is pure invention, or whether some of the incidents are
borrowed from fact, is an idle question, because a wholly unanswerable
one. If the local colour, which is laid on pretty thick, is good, as
some modern archæologists aver, it would not be strange that a Jewish
novelist who wrote not so long after the passing of Persia should
prove as well acquainted with it as a modern archæologist.
Some recent interpreters find in the story a mythical background:
Esther is Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love; Mordecai, "Marduk's
man," was originally Marduk himself, the great god of Babylon; the
name of Haman sounds something like one way of pronouncing the name of
an Elamite god in the epic of Gilgamesh. The triumph of Mordecai and
Esther over Haman would thus be an echo of ancient strife between the
gods of Babylonia and Elam. It will be obvious, however, to the
mythologically unsophisticated understanding, that if these very
problematical combinations are right, the author of the Book of
Esther was quite innocent of them, and therefore that for the
interpretation of the story he tells they are wholly irrelevant.
The Book of Esther, it was long ago observed, is singular among the
books of the Bible in that there is no mention of God in it. It is
Jewish with a sanguinary loyalty to race, but of Judaism as religion
there is not a trace; it is in fact somewhat obtrusive by its absence.
When Mordecai warns Esther that if she fails her people in their hour
of need deliverance will come "from another place," the word God is
ostentatiously avoided; before her great adventure she fasts three
days, but there is no suggestion of prayer; in the celebrations of
rescue and the annual commemoration of it there is feasting and
gladness, but no thanksgiving to God. It is no wonder that orthodox
rabbis doubted the inspiration of so conspicuously secular romance,
nor that the Greek translators made good the religious deficiencies of
the book by putting pious prayers into the mouth of Mordecai and
Esther at the appropriate junctures.
The age of the book cannot be very closely determined; it is pretty
certainly not older than the third century B.C., more likely from the
second. A note at the end of the Greek version says that this
translation was brought from Jerusalem to Egypt in the year which
corresponds to 114 B.C. The earliest mention of the festival of Purim
is in 2 Macc. xv. 36, where it is called Mordecai Day.
RUTH.--The story of Ruth is laid in the time of the Judges, for which
reason it was placed in the Greek Bible and in modern versions between
Judges and Samuel. It tells of a young Moabitess, the childless widow
of a Judæan from Bethlehem, who accompanies her widowed mother-in-law
back to Bethlehem, embracing her religion. Ruth goes out to glean
after the reapers and by chance comes to the field of Boaz, a kinsman
of her husband, who shows her kindness. By Naomi's contrivance, she
reveals to him who she is under circumstances that appeal to his
chivalry, and, after a nearer of kin has waived his right, Boaz takes
the widow with the land, and they live happy ever after. Their son
Obed is David's grandfather. The legal proceedings in the last chapter
are different from anything we otherwise know of Israelite custom, but
our ignorance is no warrant for assuming that the usage there
described is fictitious.
If the story of Esther is told with dramatic power, that of Ruth is
told with idyllic grace. The pathos of the moment in which Naomi bids
her daughters-in-law return to their mothers' homes and Ruth refuses
to part from her is unforced. The picture of the gleaners in the
fields; the delicacy with which the night at the threshing-floor is
treated; the scene at the city gate, where the waiver and redemption
are witnessed and the shoe given in attestation; the blessing of the
townsmen on the union, all have the charm of simple and unaffected
narrative.
The question what the book was written for has received diverse
answers. It has been thought that the author meant to protest against
the narrowness of those who condemned all marriages with foreigners
and put the Moabites under a special ban, by showing that David
himself had Moabite blood in his veins; others see the point of the
book in the commendation of the marriage of childless widows, not by
brothers-in-law only as the levirate law required, but by remoter
kinsmen. Others have conjectured otherwise. In this state of the case
it is safe to say that if the author had an ulterior motive, he
concealed it more successfully than is common to story-tellers who
write with a purpose.
There are no very definite signs in the book of the age in which it
was written. The author is familiar with the Hebrew literature of the
good period, and writes a better imitation of it than some. It is
precisely this imitative character which stands in the way of putting
the book in the days of the kingdom. But where, in the centuries of
the Persian or Greek dominion it belongs, it is impossible to say.
JONAH.--The third of the short stories, Jonah, is not found, like
Esther and Ruth, in the Jewish Bible in the miscellaneous collection
of "Scriptures" and in the Christian Bible among the Historical Books,
but in the prophetic canon, as one of the Minor Prophets. The reason,
doubtless, is that it is not only a story about a prophet and his
mission, but was thought to be written by himself.
The tale is too familiar to have to be retold at length. The Israelite
prophet, Jonah the son of Amittai, is commissioned by God to go to
Nineveh and announce its impending destruction; to escape this
unwelcome errand he embarks on a Phoenician ship bound for Spain, at
the other end of the world; a tempest threatens to engulf the ship;
the seamen cast lots to discover against whom the gods are so angry;
the lot falls on Jonah, and he is cast into the sea, which thereupon
becomes calm; Jonah is swallowed by a monstrous fish, which after
three days sets him ashore safe and sound. He goes to Nineveh and
delivers his message; the people repent of their sins, and God repents
of his purpose to destroy them, whereat the prophet is very indignant
and upbraids God with his soft-heartedness; he expected this from the
beginning, and therefore tried to flee to Tarshish. By his own grief
for the death of the plant "which sprang up in a night and perished in
a night," the prophet is taught the lesson of the divine compassion:
"How should I not have compassion on this great city, Nineveh, in
which are more than a hundred and twenty thousand human beings which
do not know their right hand from their left, not to speak of cattle?"
With this rebuke the book ends.
These closing words leave no room for question about the purpose of
the book. In the person of Jonah, the rebuke is addressed to the Jews,
to whom God's long-suffering with the heathen was a stumbling-block.
The greater prophetic books, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all contain a
long array of oracles against foreign nations, predicting their total
and remediless destruction, some of them very precise as to time and
agent (see, for example, Isa. 13 f., against Babylon). The fulfilment
of these prophecies, the final breaking of the power of the heathen
world, must come before the golden age of Israel could dawn. Yet the
generations came and went, and the heathen still ruled the earth!
Then, too, the Jews doubtless felt that they, as the people of God,
had an exclusive claim on his affections, as he asserted exclusive
claims to theirs. The author of Jonah not only extends to mankind
God's word in Ezekiel, "Have I any pleasure in the death of the
wicked? saith the Lord God, and not rather that he should return from
his way and live?" but he asserts the all-embracing compassion of God.
The one God is the creator of the heathen as well as of Israel, his
merciful providence is over all his works.
The higher spirit of Judaism here reproves the lower, narrow,
exclusive, and intolerant spirit, which could unfortunately allege so
much warrant for itself from the law and the prophets. Therein the
author had many and noble successors, not only among the sages, with
their cosmopolitan wisdom, but in the circles of the law.
It is not the fault of the author that modern readers and interpreters
have had their attention diverted from the moral of the book to the
fable in which it is conveyed; he could not have imagined the
pseudo-historical frame of mind to which the question whether it all
happened thus and so was of such absorbing importance that it might
almost be said that the sea-monster swallowed the commentators as well
as the prophet. For one of the difficulties of the book he is not
responsible, the psalm (Jonah ii. 2-9) which Jonah sings in the fish's
belly was put in his mouth by a later editor; vs. 10 is the immediate
sequel of vs. 1. The poem was evidently not composed for the place; it
is a hymn of thanksgiving not a prayer for deliverance; but the
(figurative) references to the depths of the abyss seemed appropriate
to Jonah's situation.
The hero of the story is a historical character, of whom, to be sure,
we know only that he came from a place named Gath-hepher, and
predicted the reconquest of lost Israelite territories which Jeroboam
II. achieved (2 Kings xiv. 25). It has been conjectured that the
author of our book may have heard in some way that he went on a
mission to Nineveh; but if he had, that would not make the book any
more historical.
Jonah, like Ruth and Esther, belongs to the later period of Hebrew
literature; it is more likely that it was written after the time of
Alexander than before, but greater definiteness is not justified.