Tamar Weissman and Batnadiv HaKarmi
In Tractate Megillah, the Sages offer a series of petihtot, or prologues, which serve to introduce their readings of the Book of Esther. A petihta is a classical midrashic strategy of introducing a biblical story or scene through the prism of a biblical verse from an unrelated context. By stepping outside of the immediate confines of the story, the petihta reframes it, offering a fresh perspective. Both the story being introduced and the verse used as petihta are transformed by the juxtaposition of these otherwise unrelated contexts, each illuminating the other in surprising ways.[1]
Yet, while petihtot are a common midrashic tool, they rarely serve to introduce whole biblical books. Indeed, Esther is the only book to be accompanied by a series of introductions. This perhaps reflects Esther’s unique duality: Esther is an outlier to the canon, full of pomp and pageantry, with a dearth of overt religious content. (Indeed, the Midrash offers snippets of arguments over its preservation for posterity).2 Yet concurrently, Esther is also the only biblical book to be read annually in a Hakheil-like ceremony attended by all. As such, its canonicity and centrality cannot be ignored or elided. Thus, the talmudic tractate that focuses on how and when the Megillah is read also offers multiple gateways to integrate the book into the wider biblical context. One after another, the Sages offer different petihtot to serve as interpretive prisms, each highlighting a different element — be it historic, thematic, or theological — of this central but troubling text.
R. Yonatan offers the first of these petihtot — one which seems straightforwardly historical, placing the Megillah within the sweep of biblical history:
Rabbi Yonatan opened [the book of Esther] with the following petihta: “For I will rise up against them, [says the Lord of hosts] and cut off from Babylonia name and remnant, offspring and grandchild, says the Lord.” (Isaiah 14:22)
“Name” — refers to writing;
“Remnant” — refers to language;
“Offspring” — refers to sovereignty;
“Grandchild” — refers to Vashti. (Megillah 10b)
For R. Yonatan, the fall of Babylonia is the unifying theme of the Megillah. This is surprising, as the Megillah is emphatically set in Shushan, capital of the Persian empire of the sixth century BCE, which benevolently ruled the vast stretches of the Near and Far East. Yet, for R. Yonatan, the seemingly joyous celebration of Ahasuerus’ reign with which the Megillah opens actually obscures a prolonged and systematic attack on his Babylonian predecessor. Not simply a transfer of power, this was a total war aimed at eradicating the language, writing, and laws of Babylonia, along with the last surviving members of the Babylonian royal family. Destroying the Babylonian language and writing represents obliterating their ethos and culture, while overturning their sovereignty involves overhauling their methods of governance. The destruction was to be total.
This counter-intuitive petihta points to the profound impact of the Babylonian empire at this juncture in Jewish history. It is not enough, R. Yonatan implicitly argues, to acknowledge the Persian context of the Megillah. Rather, we must widen the lens, scoping back to Babylonia, destroyer of the Temple, ravager of Judea. Throughout the many years of exile, Israel’s hope was kept alive by God’s promise that “at the end of seventy years, I will make an accounting [p’k’d] with the king of Babylonia…and I will make it a desolation for all time” (Jeremiah 25:12). The redemption of Judea and the destruction of Babylonia were seen as linked, and set within a 70-year time frame. Jewish national hopes indeed seemed to be realized with the Persian conquest of Babylonia, when Cyrus the Great generously allowed all conquered peoples (including the Jewish people) to return to their indigenous homelands and rebuild their temples: “So says Cyrus, King of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth has the Lord, God of Heaven, delivered to me. He has charged [p’k’d] me to build a temple for Him in Jerusalem” (Ezra 1:2).
Yet, the early hopefulness that accompanied the rise of Persia was stymied, as “adversaries of Judah” tried to stall the work of the returned exiles:
In the reign of Ahasuerus…[the adversaries] drew up an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem… They [the Persians]…used force of arms to constrain the Jews. So ended the work in the house of God which is in Jerusalem… (Ezra 4:23, 24)
The Megillah opens at this crucial moment, when Persia has shut down the rebuilding of the Temple. It is a period of historic agony for Israel: seventy years of waiting seemed to have come to naught, and the great promise of redemption propelled by the Cyrus declaration has fizzled out. Babylonia might be gone, but its impact lingers — the Temple still destroyed, the Land of Israel in ruins. The Midrash reinforces this context by illustrating Vashti, the last vestige of Babylonian royalty,[2] working to actively conserve the Babylonian legacy:
[Vashti] did not allow Ahasuerus to give permission to rebuild the Temple.
She said: “You wish to rebuild what my ancestors destroyed?” (Esther Rabbah 5:2)
In this version, Cyrus’s great revolution is being actively undermined from within the royal house, and the lavish party that opens the Book of Esther is a celebration of Vashti’s victory over Jewish dreams — a recreation of the feast of her ancestor, King Belshazzar, in which he reveled in his dominance over God’s Temple.[3]
R. Yonatan’s petihta comes to address this despair. After all, there are many biblical passages (e.g., Jeremiah 25:12, quoted above, and Daniel 2:31-39) that speak of the fall of Babylonia — verses that are directly related to the historical context of the Megillah, and whose relevance is therefore immediately apparent. Yet, R. Yonatan makes the less obvious choice of the verse from Isaiah. The reason for this choice is the four distinct elements it details in the destruction of Babylonia: “name and remnant, offspring and grandchild.” His choice of verse underlines that there are multiple elements of the Babylonian regime that must be destroyed, and that the end of Babylonia is not a one-time event that took place at the seventy-year-mark, but rather a process that began at that point, and continued to unravel. Thus, there is no reason to despair of redemption. While it is true that Israel has reached the days of Persia, and should have been redeemed, the overthrow of Babylonia is not yet complete. The final overthrow takes place over the course of Esther, which, in R. Yonatan’s estimation, might be retitled: The Destruction of Babylonia, Detailed.
The significance of the four elements of Babylonia slated for destruction — writing, language, law, and royalty — become clearer when we look at the Babylonian’s own self-concept. The Neo-Babylonian empire (626-539 BCE) saw itself as the rightful inheritor of ancient Babylonian culture. It consciously strove to revive the ethos and traditions of the first Babylonian kingdom, which preceded Neo-Babylonia by at least a thousand years. The infamous Nebuchadnezzar II, destroyer of the Temple, explicitly evoked the memory of early Mesopotamian kings such as Hammurabi (1810-1750 BCE). Nabonidus, who took the throne six years after Nebu I’llchadnezzar, presented himself in a similar fashion. They were the guardians of a venerable Babylonian heritage: restoring ancient cultic practices, renewing the titles (“name”) of Old Babylonian dynasties, aligning themselves with the traditions of Mesopotamian royalty. From their royal inscriptions to their architectural and religious renewal projects, these kings deliberately anchored themselves in Babylonia’s storied past. Moreover, the Neo-Babylonians preserved the use of Akkadian cuneiform (“writing”) for official inscriptions, religious texts, and scholarly works, thus extending a literary tradition that reached back more than a millennium.
This deliberate revival of ancient Babylonia did not escape the notice of the Sages, who note the linkage between ancient and Neo-Babylonian culture:
Nebuchadnezzar was a wicked man, son of a wicked man — the disciple [or descendant] of Nimrod the wicked, who caused the entire world to rebel against Me during his reign. (Pesahim 94a-b)
In evoking Nimrod as Nebuchadnezzar’s precursor, the Sages anchor Neo-Babylonia in the mythic dawn of history. Nimrod is a primordial biblical figure, representative of ancient Babylonia: “The first mighty figure on earth…a mighty hunter before God” (Genesis 10:8-9), he establishes the first human kingdom in “Babylonia…in the plains of Shinar” (10:10). This land of Shinar is a locus of defiance, site of the infamous Tower whose top was to reach the very heavens:
It came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; […] And they said, “Let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered. (Genesis 11:2-4)
Nimrod’s kingdom is thus linked to the Tower of Babel, prompting the Sages to suggest that he orchestrated the entire enterprise, living up to the literal meaning of his name as “Rebel” or “Challenger.”[4]
As the first king and the prime builder of monuments to human greatness, Nimrod, in midrashic tradition, becomes the archetypal strongman, the charismatic6 tyrant who equates independence with revolt:[5]
As it says, “Nimrod — a mighty hunter before the face of God” (Genesis 10:9). It will be said of any man who has the temerity to know his Creator full well and yet willfully defy him: here’s another Nimrod! (Rashi based on Sifra, Behokotai 2:2)
Nimrod’s roots reach deep indeed, for he is first introduced at the closing of the Deluge saga: he appears as one of the descendants of Noah. This context is significant: the primary achievement of the sons of Noah is being “fruitful,” and “scattering across the Earth” (Genesis 9:19), in order to fulfill God’s central command to postdiluvian humanity to “fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1). To forge a new world, Noah’s offspring had to spread to every distant corner, allowing humanity to diversify in language, culture, and ethnicity, spreading into “islands of nations, in their lands, each with his own language, in accordance with their clans and their nationalities” (Genesis 10:10). Nimrod rebels against teeming diversity. He is the nemesis of variety and the champion of homogeneity, insisting upon “one language…identical opinions…one nation” (Genesis 11:1, 6). Nimrod builds a tower and fortified city “lest we scatter” (Genesis 11:4). He preaches uniformity, seeing any divergence as a threat to his regime. Like many dictators, his rigid survival depends on suppressing individual freedoms to ensure safety, stability, and a monolithic “name.”
In linking Nebuchadnezzar with Nimrod, primal king of Babylon,[6] the Talmud succinctly sums up the mythological, backward-looking self-presentation of Nebuchadnezzar II’s Neo-Babylonian empire, which modeled itself on a romanticized myth of a bygone era. Indeed, Neo-Babylonia replayed critical elements of the Babel story. Like Nimrod, Nebuchadnezzar demanded integration into the single “language and writings of the Chaldeans” (Daniel 1:4), exiling conquered peoples so they would assimilate, even stripping them of distinctive names.9 And, like Nimrod, he required absolute conformity, crushing any hint of dissent:
Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was sixty cubits…and set it up in the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon. Then a herald cried aloud, “To you it is commanded, O people, nations, and languages, that when you hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music, you must fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king has set up: whoever does not fall down and worship shall the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace.” (Daniel 3:1-6)
Nebuchadnezzar’s towering statue in the plain is an updated version of Nimrod’s tower, rising from the plain. If in the Midrash, Nimrod casts Abraham into the furnace for refusing to bow to idolatry, Nebuchadnezzar here threatens to do the same.[7]
R. Yonatan’s petihta highlights the sweeping shift in imperial ideologies that occurred when Nebuchadnezzar’s Neo-Babylonian empire fell to the Achaemenids.[8] This approach is famously embodied in the Cyrus Cylinder (6th century BCE), where Cyrus the Great declares his policy of allowing exiled communities—including the Judeans—to return home and rebuild their shrines. Although it was hardly a universal “bill of rights,” the text reveals Cyrus’s intention to restore local cults and institutions, hinting at a broader stance of religious and cultural tolerance.12
The Achaemenids departed from the overtly oppressive model of Neo-Babylonian dominion, permitting local laws, customs, and religions to remain intact under the authority of Persian satraps who preserved imperial interests. Though they still demanded obedience, tribute, and military cooperation, the Achaemenid revolution controlled through pragmatism rather than through brute force. They maintained order by relying on local elites, allowing for a degree of autonomy and tolerating cultural differences. They were the first major imperial power in the ancient world to accommodate, rather than eradicate, local diversity.
In his petihta, R. Yonatan points us toward this subtext. On the surface, the Persian character of Megillat Esther is obvious — its setting in Shushan (Susa), and its many Persian loanwords ground the narrative in an Achaemenid milieu.[9] The Megillah concurrently points towards the revolutionary nature of the Achaemenid ideology via frequent references to the empire’s manifold satrapies. The kingdom’s diverse provinces are mentioned twenty-six times, underscoring the range of cultural and ethnic identities within Persian rule.[10]
Additionally, the king and his advisers seem careful to honor their subjects’ personal autonomy. The narrative specifies that “every man should wield authority in his home” (Esther 1:22), and at Ahasuerus’s populist festival — open “to all the people, high and low alike” (Esther 1:5) — the wine flows “with no compulsion…complying with each man’s wishes” (Esther 1:8).[11] Above all, the Megillah draws repeated attention to the preservation of multiple languages and scripts — a veritable recreation of the dispersal of the Tower by “confusing their language” (Genesis 11:9) in mythic Babylon:
On the thirteenth day of the first month, the king’s scribes were summoned and a decree was issued, as Haman directed, to the king’s satraps, to the governors of every province, and to the officials of every people, to every province in its own script and to every people in its own language. (Esther 3:12)
Letters were written, at Mordecai’s dictation, to the Jews and to the satraps, the governors and the officials of the one hundred and twenty-seven provinces from India to Nubia: to every province in its own script and to every people in its own language, and to the Jews in their own script and language. (Esther 8:9)
R. Yonatan’s petihta argues that these elements are not incidental, but rather central. The complete eradication of Neo-Babylonia’s administrative hallmarks — its writing (standardized cuneiform script and royal inscriptions), language (Akkadian), sovereignty (centralized government), and royal family (Vashti) — defines the Megillah’s principal theme. The Persian Empire, by consciously allowing multiple ethnicities, religions, and nationalities to flourish, created the conditions for Jewish renewal. While still without an autonomous homeland or Temple — “scattered and dispersed among the peoples in all of the provinces” (Esther 3:8) — the Jews could begin to reinvent themselves, insisting, for the first time, on “their own script and language.” The Megillah opens at a moment of despair, to highlight the passage needed for redemption. Its political backdrop of transformed notions of rulership is integral to that story.
The petihtot offer rich and complex readings of the Megillah by weaving a subtle interplay between the world of Esther and the wider biblical story. R. Yonatan’s petihta places the seemingly lighthearted opening of the Megillah within the darker context of Israel’s national saga of exile and redemption. It also responds to the broader historical context of the era, noting how succession plays out in the text. Even as R. Yonatan highlights how the Achaemeneids deliberately deconstructed the Neo- Babylonian program, he places this political transformation within the context of Israel’s failed salvation. The midrashic lens refracts and responds to Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid national narratives, while integrating them into the Jewish story. For R. Yonatan, redemption is not only the physical return to Zion, enabled by Cyrus, but the sublimation of the conqueror’s story into the Jewish national odyssey.
[1] For more on the midrashic genre of petihta, see Simi Peters, Learning to Read Midrash (Urim: 2005), 44-45. 2 Megillah 9b.
[2] Megillah 10b.
[3] Belshazzar’s infamous feast is described in Daniel 5. Megillah 11b, Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 49:9, and Esther Rabbah 22 all analyze Ahasuerus’s feast as a celebration of the end of the Jewish dream of rebuilding the Temple.
[4] According to Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 24, it was Nimrod who “said to his people, ‘Let us build ourselves a large city.’” 6 “He was a mighty hunter before God” (Genesis 10:9) — “he was a hunter with his mouth, ensnaring people with his rhetoric” (Genesis Rabbah 37:2).
[5] For more on Nimrod as archetypal tyrant, see Matis Weinberg, “The Rainbow and the Tower,” Frameworks: Genesis (Jerusalem: Foundation for Jewish Publications, 1999), 32-43.
[6] Additionally, rabbinic literature further suggests a link between Nebuchadnezzar and Nimrod by identifying Nebuchadnezzar’s wife as “Shemiramit” (Esther Rabbah 3, Vayikra Rabbah 19). This was the legendary queen Semiramis, made famous by the first century BCE Greek historian Diodorus’s account, and likely based on an actual historical figure, Shammu-Rammat, a queen regent of the Assyrian empire in the ninth century BCE who was credited with rebuilding Babylon. The rabbinic assignment of Semiramis to the Neo-Babylonian empire is another way to link that empire back to an earlier era. Incidentally, a fairly recent popular religious work by Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons
(Grapevine India, 2024) (first published in 1853) mistakenly identifies Semiramis as Nimrod’s wife. 9 Daniel 1:7.
[7] Genesis Rabbah 38:13.
[8] Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Eisenbrauns, 2002), 90-105, 173-187. 12 For the biblical parallel, see Ezra 1:1-4.
[9] Adele Berlin, The JPS Bible Commentary: Esther (Jewish Publication Society, 2001), xv-xviii.
[10] The broad span of cultures represented in the Persian kingdom is introduced in the Megillah’s opening verse: “Ahasuerus reigned over a hundred and twenty-seven provinces from India to Ethiopia” (Esther 1:1). For an historical discussion of Achaemenid provincial administration, the satrapal system, and the empire’s pragmatic approach to local governance, touching on how (and why) Persians often preserved regional customs, local laws, and religious institutions, see Christopher Tulpin, “The Administration of the Achaemenid Empire,” Coinage and Administration in the Athenian and Persian Empires: The Ninth Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History, edited by Ian Carradice,
(Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1987): 109-166. Additionally, some Greek authors like Herodotus and Xenophon depicted Persian imperial rule as relatively tolerant of local customs. For more on this, see Pierre Briant,
“Herodotus and the Persian Empire,” Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, edited by E.J. Bakker, I.J.F. de Jong, and H. van Wees (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 503-518.
[11] The Sages consistently interpret the details of the party (Esther 1:6-8) as expressing Ahasuerus’ populist agenda. For numerous examples, see Megillah 12a.
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