THE BOOK OF ESTHER'S ORIGIN is explained by Oxford Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley in a new book reviewed in BMCR:

Stephanie Dalley, Esther's Revenge at Susa. From Sennacherib to Ahasuerus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 262; maps 4, figs. 53. ISBN 978-0-19-921663-5. $99.00.

Reviewed by Gary Beckman, University of Michigan (sidd@umich.edu)
Word count: 936 words

The Book of Esther is perhaps the oddest work included within the canon of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The story is set in Iranian Susa--far away from ancient Israel and Judah, and the biblical God is not mentioned even once in the text. Rather, we encounter a folkloristic narrative in which a murderous plot against the Jews of the Persian Empire is thwarted and turned back upon its originator without the aid of divine intervention, solely through the efforts of a virtuous, beautiful, and courageous woman. While there is still much debate among practitioners of biblical studies as to the historical veracity of many of the tales contained in the Books of the Pentateuch, Samuel, and Kings, few outside of fundamentalist circles seriously maintain that the widespread massacre of anti-Semites described at the conclusion of the Book of Esther--and mentioned in no independent ancient source--actually took place. And it was already recognized more than a century ago that the names of the protagonists of the work, Esther and her uncle Mordecai, are not ordinary Hebrew personal designations, but rather mutations of the names of the Mesopotamian divinities Ishtar (goddess of love and war) and Marduk (patron deity of the city of Babylon).

In this ambitious book, Stephanie Dalley, a cuneiform scholar from Oxford, sets herself the task of explaining just how this work came into being and why it entered the sacred literature of the Jews. She is well prepared to tackle this problem, having over the past decade devoted particular attention in her research to the precipitation of Assyrian and Babylonian traditions in both Classical Greek and biblical sources, discussing, for example, the "Hanging Gardens of Babylon," Semiramis, and the wives of Sargon II of Assyria (see bibliography, pp. 230-31).

[...]

The theory in brief:

... In a nutshell, she speculates that in Assyrian religion, significant historical incidents could be translated to the divine plane, incorporated into mythology, and reenacted in turn by humans in ritual, as documented in the obscure Akkadian-language liturgical scripts known to scholars as "Cultic Commentaries" (113-20). In particular, Dalley further postulates that the wars of Assurbanipal against the Elamites, whose capital was at Susa, were reflected in a festival of Ishtar of Nineveh (156). Consequently, the cultic calendar pertaining to this avatar of the goddess and various elements of her worship were passed on in oral and written tradition after the fall of Assyria, to reappear in altered form in the story of Esther. The resultant narrative entered the lore of the Jews as an aetiology for the festival of purim "lots," the etymology of whose designation unquestionably points to an Assyrian origin (167).

It will be interesting to see how convincing other Assyriologists find the reconstruction of this cultic calendar. The reviewer registers a very Scottish verdict of "not proven."