What is the holiday about?
Our current text of the book of Esther is certainly edited from the original story. It appears that the names of most of the characters have been changed. Herodotus records that the wife of Xerxes I (Ahasuerus in Hebrew) was named Amestris. Although this name is similar enough to the Hebrew text’s “Esther” to allow us to believe the same person is referred to, the name Esther sounds even more like the name of the Babylonian god Ishtar. (Esther’s original, Hebrew name of Hadassah means “myrtle” in Hebrew.) In fact most of the names in the story have apparently been changed to reflect an incident in Persian religious history. 160 years before the reign of Xerxes I, at about the same time that Nebuchadnezzar took the people of Judah captive, the Persians completely wiped out the Elamite civilization east of Babylon. In that part of the Persian Empire, Babylonian mythology triumphed over the indigenous Elamite mythology. In Babylonian mythology, Marduk and Ishtar are cousins (as are Mordec
