Back to school with Esther

I'm in my forties, and I'm back to school. Part of my PhD program is I have to do a couple of classes, so this semester it's Medieval Hebrew, Esther and Daniel. Today was really fun, with my first outing into Medieval Hebrew, but I have to prepare Esther 1:1-9 for tomorrow, and there are a couple of interesting points to note.

First is, there are very few verbs. In this first section, 1:1-9, there are only five active verbs, and I think this gives us our five sections:

1. And it happened in the days of the great king Ahaseuros (1:1)
2. The generous king held a great feast and displayed his wealth (1:2-4)
3. The king held a banquet in his ornate palace garden (1:5-6)
4. The king instructed the wine to flow without restriction (1:7-8)
5. The queen Vashti held a banquet for the ladies in the king's royal house (1:9)

The great care with verbs means they are infrequent, and three of them are repeated, leaving only the first, "and it happened", which introduces the story, and then the confusing verb, עסד (yissad), which could mean various things, but in context, means something like "made a firm instruction" (to not withhold wine from anyone).

The second thing which stood out was the royal names and the word "king" and "queen". Each of the five active verbs more or less has an accompanying "king" or "queen", which is indicated in the summary above. This is particularly skilfully used by the narrator, because when we hit the fifth verb, it is not the king, but the queen, and she is having her own royal booze-up, but just for the ladies.

This, of course, very clearly sets up the tension which will allow for Esther to enter the story, and the rest of the goings on.

Fourth, the centre of the passage, 1:5-6, has a lot of unknown vocab, which I gave up on. It's just a long sequence of nouns, which I take it are just trying to show how very rich and opulent and overwhelming is the king's palace garden, where this final banquet for the king's nearest and dearest is held.

Finally, there was one nice bit of parallelism which I quite liked: 1:4 has this repeated structure:

         בְּהַרְאֹת֗וֹ

אֶת־עֹ֨שֶׁר֙ כְּב֣וֹד מַלְכוּת֔וֹ

וְאֶ֨ת־יְקָ֔ר תִּפְאֶ֖רֶת גְּדוּלָּת֑וֹ

he let them see

his kingdom's glorious wealth

and his majesty's previous pomp

The very tight repetition stands out, perhaps because the rest of it is such a slog. But it does feel a bit like Hezekiah (Isaiah 39), although I'm not sure there's any fear that the guests will take over his kingdom.

Anyway, that's the first section of Esther 1. I'm looking forward to find out what else we'll find out in class!