Haman, Esther, and the Conflation of Religion and Politics That Betrays the Bible

Last update: 2026-04-27 09:43:57

Purim and Iran: This time we’re not powerless. This is what Israel ha-yom, the pro-Netanyahu free newspaper that is now the most widely read daily in Israel, wrote on its English website on February 26. And indeed, there are quite a few parallels that the story of Purim—the Jewish carnival that was celebrated on March 3—seems to offer with the current conflict, at least at first glance. Let us briefly recall the essential elements of this story, which is told in the Book of Esther, in two rather different versions depending on the language (Hebrew or Greek).

Plot at the King’s Court

After the fall of Jerusalem, the Jews found themselves in exile in Persia, present-day Iran. The Persian emperor Ahasuerus—who corresponds to the Xerxes of the wars with the Greek poleis, although here he takes on legendary traits—had delegated his powers to the vizier Haman to devote himself to a life of pleasure with his large harem. One day, Queen Vashti refuses to appear before Ahasuerus and is repudiated. To replace her, the King announces a beauty contest, which is won by a Jewish woman, Esther. Meanwhile, however, Esther’s uncle Mordecai has refused to bow down before the vizier, who, enraged, obtains from the king permission to exterminate all the Jews. Esther, however, intervenes with the king and succeeds in saving her people: Haman ends his days hanged on a stake, while the Jews celebrate their deliverance by instituting the festival of Purim, which is still observed today.

An important detail: the evil vizier Haman is said to descend from the king of the Amalekites, the people exterminated by the Jews during the Exodus and who, in the Bible, embody absolute evil. If Netanyahu has already cast the Palestinians as modern Amalekites, the story of Purim thus makes it possible to establish a link with Iran. In its updated version, the “Palestinian” evil vizier plots the extermination of the Jews with the agreement of the Iranian shah, only to see his machinations fail miserably. With one small variation compared with the biblical account—one that did not escape the editors of the Israeli far-right website: this time the Jews “are not powerless” and do not need to rely on Esther’s fragile beauty, for they can count on the far more solid arguments of their American patron. Whether the current Persian authorities will manage to distance themselves in time from the Palestinian vizier—perhaps through an opportune regime change—remains to be seen. Certainly, there are already pretenders, such as Reza Pahlavi, who would be eager to take on this role.

A Groundless Interpretation

These parallels between biblical narratives and contemporary history may seem ridiculous. They are not. Even if no one, I believe, would be so eccentric as to see the triggering cause of the current conflict in the Book of Esther, or even of its timing close to Purim, they are nevertheless an integral part of the ethno-religious discourse that has become hegemonic in Israel and that plays an important role in legitimizing the new military venture domestically. Once again, they raise the question of the supposed religious justification for what is unfolding before our eyes in the Middle East.

This is a very slippery issue for Christians, and it often places them in a position of cultural inferiority, preventing them from articulating a response that may be both clear and rooted in their faith. While the ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran appeals to a different value system—though still connected to the biblical universe—every time Israel brandishes scriptural arguments, an uncomfortable alternative seems to arise for Christians: either to accept them, as Christian Zionists do, or to reject them while internalizing a muted distrust towards the Bible, thereby implicitly vindicating those who claim that it justifies violence. It may not be openly acknowledged, but the unease smolders beneath the surface.

To put it plainly: this religious justification does not exist. It clearly does not exist in the New Testament. Nor does it exist in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, if it is read according to its historical development and not simply by isolating a few verses concerning the Promised Land and the command to exterminate the peoples of Canaan.

That such justification does not exist in the New Testament is evident. On the one hand, Jesus renounces all forms of violence and commands his followers to do the same. On the other, he refuses to be imprisoned in the cage of a political Messiah—a choice that requires a constant conversion even on the part of his apostles: even after the Easter, at the moment of farewell on the Mount of the Ascension, they still ask him whether the time has come to restore the kingdom of Israel by driving out the Romans. The opening to the nations, which unfolds through the first missionary journeys, completes this conversion. And one need not be a sophisticated exegete to know that the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles can be read as a single great journey, leading from Galilee to Jerusalem (Gospel), and from Jerusalem to the world (Acts).

Exile as Revelation

But even if one considers only the Hebrew Bible, the result does not change. The turning point here is the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the subsequent exile. Until that moment, the Jews had lived under a monarchy that identified possession of the land with divine favor, explaining any political setbacks as a lack of fidelity to the Law. It is this theology of history—which, for example, underlies the narrative of Deuteronomy—that also guides the reading of earlier events, particularly the conquest of the Promised Land. Concerning this event, moreover,it is worth noting, as the Jerusalem Bible writes in its introduction to the Book of Joshua, that it is presented through “an idealized and simplified picture.” Significantly, some biblical narratives seem to intervene precisely to prevent a one-sided reading of these events; this is the case, for example, with the Book of Ruth, from which we learn that the great David, the messianic king par excellence, descends from a Moabite woman, the historic enemies of the Jews. This is not a small detail, given that in the Bible genealogy is transmitted through the female line.

In any case, the fall of the monarchy represents a point of rupture, and the great flourishing of prophetic literature can also be understood as an attempt to find sense in a national tragedy that brought with it the collapse of all former certainties: “This is my grief, that the right hand of the Most High has changed,” confesses the Psalmist (77 [76]:11).

The return to the homeland of a portion of the exiles—the “remnant of Israel” mentioned by Isaiah—seems to offer a response to this crisis. The people have been purified and can return to their pre-exilic condition. But this is not the case. The land, in fact, is restored in a different way than before the exile. It is not an easy transition: the instinct of this “remnant,” deeply religious as they are, is to turn back the clock, as if the exile could be dismissed as an unfortunate parenthesis. The prophetic oracles of Haggai and Zechariah capture the moment when the survivors imagine that a descendant of David, Zerubbabel, after an initial provisional rebuilding of the Temple, might restore the monarchy. But the plan fails: the inhabitants of Judah remain under Persian rule, and in the end the Judaism that emerges is that of Ezra the scribe, centered on the Law and worship, no longer on monarchy and land.

For Christians, this story—accompanied in the later Prophets by a growing awareness of a possible positive role also for non-Jewish nations—prepares the further turning point of Jesus. It is striking to observe, in fact, that the rabbi from Nazareth appears on the scene of Israel precisely when, after the monarchy, the legitimate line of high priests also comes to an end, interrupted by Herod with the killing of the last of the Hasmoneans, and shortly before the Temple is destroyed by the Romans. These are coincidences that invite reflection, and Christians grasped them from the very beginning (one can already think of the account of Eusebius of Caesarea in the Ecclesiastical History), even if, unfortunately, they have often been paired with an anti-Jewish polemic that should have no place.

But let us return to the main point. A reading of the pages of the Hebrew Bible makes it clear that exile represents a point of no return. As foretold by Jeremiah, the survivors receive the land back. But the second time is not like the first. They must now renounce the political project of the Davidic monarchy. One might then say that the spiritual drama of Israel’s religious right lies precisely in failing to grasp this transition: they live in the time of Ezra (though without the Temple, for now) but still think in terms of Joshua and David. Exile is not only a historical fact that can be overcome—modern Zionism, in a sense, arises from this very idea. Exile is also a category of revelation, and as such it cannot be erased as if it had never existed.

For this very reason, the experience of Smol Emuni (“Faithful Left”) is particularly interesting: they are a small group of observant Jews who do not identify with the current fundamentalist drift, as described by Francesca Gorgoni in an article for Ha Keillah, the journal of the Jewish studies group of Turin. Breaking with a recurring pattern in Israel—where secular leftists are (or at least were) more inclined to listen to Palestinian voices, while religious groups tend naturally toward right-wing nationalism—this small group, along with other experiences of practicing Jewish intellectuals in Israel and the diaspora, shows that the Hebrew Bible already contains within itself the antidotes to a fundamentalist reading. It is enough to read it in its entirety: the later Prophets as well, the Writings (Ketubim) too. No, as Christians we should not be ashamed of the Old Testament, and we have no reason to leave its monopoly to Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies.

 

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Oasis International Foundation

 

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