Unit 14 · Poetry, Wisdom and the Scroll of Esther

Open the book of Psalms in the Jewish Publication Society translation of 1917 and look at how the lines are set. Psalm 24:1 reads: "The earth is the LORD’S, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein." The second half says the first half again with new words. "The earth" becomes "the world." "The fulness thereof" becomes "they that dwell therein." Nothing rhymes. The verse holds together because the two halves match.

Scholars call this parallelism. The name comes from Robert Lowth, an English bishop who gave lectures on Hebrew poetry at Oxford in the 1740s and published them in Latin in 1753. Lowth noticed that almost every verse of Hebrew poetry falls into two or sometimes three short lines, and that the lines answer each other in meaning. He argued that this pairing, not rhyme or meter, is the basic unit of Hebrew verse.

Modern readers have refined Lowth’s idea. James Kugel, in The Idea of Biblical Poetry (1981), argued that the second line rarely just repeats the first. It usually adds something: it goes further, gets more specific or raises the stakes. Kugel summed the pattern up as "A, and what’s more, B." Robert Alter, in The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985), made a similar case and showed how images often intensify from line to line.

Why does this matter for reading? Because a reader who expects repetition may stop listening halfway through a verse. A reader who expects the second line to push harder will look for the difference. In Psalm 24:1, "they that dwell therein" moves from land to living creatures. The verse is not saying one thing twice. It is widening the claim from the ground to everyone standing on it.

Lowth sorted parallel lines into three kinds, and teachers still use his labels. In synonymous parallelism the second line says the first line again in different words. Psalm 19:2 in the JPS 1917 numbering reads: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork." Heavens and firmament, glory and handiwork: the halves mirror each other. The effect is like a bell struck twice.

In antithetic parallelism the second line says the opposite of the first. Proverbs uses this form constantly, because contrast is how a proverb teaches. Proverbs 10:1 reads: "A wise son maketh a glad father; but a foolish son is the grief of his mother." Wise against foolish, glad against grief, father against mother. The reader learns the lesson by seeing both sides at once.

In synthetic parallelism the second line completes the first rather than restating it or opposing it. Psalm 1:3 describes the righteous person: "he shall be like a tree planted by streams of water, that bringeth forth its fruit in its season." The second line does not repeat "tree." It tells you what the tree does. Many scholars find this third label too loose, since almost any pair could fit it. Kugel argued that all three kinds are really one pattern: B goes beyond A.

The labels are tools, not rules. A verse can shift from one kind to another, and poets break every pattern on purpose. Some verses have three lines rather than two, and a third line often lands the hardest. What the labels give a reader is a habit of asking, at every semicolon, what just changed.

Parallelism is the frame, but Hebrew poetry fills the frame with pictures. Psalm 42:2 in JPS 1917 begins: "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God." A deer, a dry stream, thirst. The image carries the feeling before any abstract word does. Psalm 1 sets a well-watered tree against chaff blown by the wind. Psalm 90 compares a human life to grass that grows in the morning and is cut down by evening.

Hebrew poems also play with sound. Words that share a root echo each other, and some verses use alliteration, though this is nearly impossible to carry into English. One structure does survive translation if the translator marks it. An acrostic is a poem whose lines or stanzas begin with the letters of the alphabet in order. Hebrew has 22 letters, so acrostic poems come in multiples of 22.

Psalm 119 is the longest acrostic in the Tanakh and the longest chapter in the Bible. It has 22 stanzas of 8 verses each, 176 verses in all. Every verse in the first stanza begins with alef, every verse in the second with bet, and so on to tav. Almost every verse also names the Torah in some way: law, testimonies, precepts, statutes, commandments, ordinances, word. The form itself makes an argument: the Torah fills the whole alphabet, from A to Z.

Lamentations, the short book of grief over the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, uses the same device. Chapters 1, 2 and 4 each have 22 verses, one per letter. Chapter 3 has 66 verses, three per letter. Chapter 5 has 22 verses but drops the alphabetical order, as if the poet’s control has finally broken. Readers have seen the acrostic as a way of saying grief from A to Z, and as a way of holding shapeless pain inside a shape.

Psalm 23 is six verses long and may be the most quoted poem in the world. Its heading calls it "A Psalm of David," and Jewish tradition links many psalms to King David, whom the books of Samuel describe as a musician. Scholars date the psalms across many centuries and treat most headings as later additions. The poem itself opens with one image: "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want." Everything that follows works out what a shepherd does.

Read the verbs. The shepherd makes the speaker lie down, leads, restores, guides. Then the picture darkens: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me." Notice the shift from "He" to "Thou." In the safe fields, the speaker talks about God. In the dark valley, the speaker talks to God. Many readers point to that change of address as the poem’s center.

In the last two verses the image changes from shepherd to host. A table is set, a cup overflows, and the poem ends at a house. Jewish practice sings Psalm 23 at the third Shabbat meal in many communities and at funerals and memorials. It is also read at Christian funerals. The same six verses have carried grief in both traditions for centuries.

Psalm 150 is the last poem in the book. It is a list: praise God in the sanctuary, praise Him with trumpet, harp, drum, dance, strings, pipe and cymbals. Thirteen times in six verses the Hebrew says hallelu, praise. The last verse in JPS 1917 reads: "Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Hallelujah." The book of Psalms is divided into five books, and each of the first four ends with a short line of blessing. Psalm 150 is the blessing that closes the fifth.

Psalm 90 is the only psalm whose heading names Moses: "A Prayer of Moses the man of God." It opens Book 4 of the Psalter. The poem sets two scales side by side. For God, a thousand years are like yesterday, like a watch in the night. For a human being, life is like grass: it flourishes in the morning and by evening is cut down. Seventy years, or eighty with strength, and then, the JPS 1917 says, "we fly away."

The poem does not end in despair. It ends in a request: "So teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom" (Psalm 90:12). Counting days is not morbid here. It is the beginning of wisdom, a theme this unit will meet again in Ecclesiastes. Jewish communities recite Psalm 90 in the Shabbat morning service, and it is often read at funerals in both Jewish and Christian settings.

Psalm 137 comes from a specific moment: the exile in Babylon. The Babylonians had burned Jerusalem and its Temple in 586 BCE. "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." The captors ask for a song of Zion. The exiles answer with a question: how can we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land? Then comes a vow. If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill.

The last verses of Psalm 137 are hard. They wish on Babylon what Babylon did to Jerusalem, including violence against children. Readers handle this in different ways. Some Jewish and Christian liturgies simply omit those verses. Others insist that a prayer book must hold the whole range of human feeling, including rage, and that saying rage to God is different from acting on it. Jewish tradition connects the psalm with Tisha B’Av, the fast that mourns the Temple, and many Jews recite it on weekdays before the blessing after meals as a reminder that Jerusalem is not forgotten.

More psalms are cries for help than songs of joy. Scholars call these poems laments. The German scholar Hermann Gunkel, writing in the early twentieth century, sorted the psalms by type and setting: hymns, thanksgivings, royal psalms, laments of the individual, laments of the community. His method, called form criticism, asked what kind of poem each psalm is and what occasion it fits. Most students of the Psalms still start from his categories.

A lament usually has parts that come in a rough order. It addresses God. It complains: enemies, sickness, shame, God’s silence. It pleads for help, often with reasons why God should act. And then, in most laments, something shifts. The speaker says, in effect, but I trust you, or, you have heard me. The poem ends in praise or in a promise to praise. Readers call this shift the turn.

Psalm 13 shows the whole pattern in six verses. Four times it asks "How long?" It begs God to look and answer. Then verse 6 in the Hebrew numbering turns: the speaker says he has trusted in God’s mercy and will sing to the LORD. Nothing in the poem explains what happened between the complaint and the trust. Some readers imagine a priest speaking a word of assurance in the silence. Others read the turn as the act of praying itself doing its work.

Psalm 22 opens with the sharpest complaint in the book, a cry that God has forsaken the speaker, and ends with a vision of all the earth turning to God. Jewish readers have connected the psalm with Esther and with David. Christian readers hear its opening line in the Gospels’ accounts of the crucifixion and read the whole psalm as pointing to Jesus. The two traditions read the same poem in different frames, and this course describes both without ranking them.

The Song of Songs is the first of the five Megillot, the short scrolls read on holidays, in most printed Tanakhs. Its Hebrew title, Shir ha-Shirim, means the best of songs. Its opening verse attaches it to Solomon, and Jewish tradition counts it among his books. Scholars date its language later, some of it to the Persian period, c. 5th to 4th century BCE, though parts may be older. The book never mentions God by name, never mentions the Temple, and contains no law.

What it contains is two voices in love, with a chorus of "daughters of Jerusalem" listening in. The woman speaks more than the man, which is unusual in ancient literature. She calls herself "a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys" (2:1). She goes out at night through the city looking for him and is struck by the watchmen (5:7). He praises her from head to foot in long lists of comparisons: her eyes are doves, her hair a flock of goats coming down from Gilead, her neck a tower.

Those comparisons can sound strange to modern ears. Readers who study ancient Near Eastern poetry point to Egyptian love songs from c. 1300 to 1100 BCE that use the same kind of praise-list, called a wasf in Arabic poetry. The images are not meant to be drawn. They are meant to be felt: goats streaming down a hillside move the way heavy hair moves. The poem asks the reader to hold the picture loosely.

The book has no plot in the usual sense. Poems of longing, meeting, separation and search follow each other, and scholars disagree about whether it is one long poem or a collection. Its most famous lines come near the end: "for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave" (8:6, JPS 1917). Whatever else the book is, it is a claim that love is a force on the scale of the largest things.

How did a book of love poems without God’s name become Scripture? The Mishnah (Yadayim 3:5) records the rabbis’ debate and Rabbi Akiva’s answer that the Song is the holy of holies. Akiva’s claim rests on a way of reading called allegory: the surface tells one story, and the reader hears another beneath it. In the Jewish allegory, the woman is Israel, the man is God, and the poems of longing and search are the history of their covenant.

The Targum to the Song of Songs, an Aramaic version from perhaps the 7th or 8th century CE, spells the allegory out. It reads the book as the story of Israel from the Exodus through the Temple to the hoped-for redemption. Rashi, in the 11th century, read the Song as Israel in exile remembering the love of her youth. God, in his reading, recalls her kindness, and both look toward return. Rashi gives the plain sense of each verse first and then the allegorical sense.

Because of this reading, the Song is chanted in synagogues on the Sabbath of Passover, the festival of the Exodus. Its springtime images ("the flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing is come," 2:12) match the season. Many communities also sing its verses on Friday evening, welcoming Shabbat as a bride. Christian readers built their own allegory. Origen in the 3rd century read the Song as Christ and the church or the soul. Bernard of Clairvaux preached 86 sermons on its first two chapters in the 12th century.

Modern scholars mostly read the Song as what it appears to be, human love poetry, and ask how it came to be read otherwise. Some argue that the allegory was the price of admission to the canon. Others note that Akiva did not say the plain sense was wrong; he warned against singing the book in taverns, treating it lightly, not against hearing it as love. Both readings sit on the same page in a traditional Jewish Bible, and a reader can hold both.

The siddur, the Jewish prayer book, quotes the Psalms more than any other book. Psalm 145, an acrostic, is recited three times a day. It is known by its added first word, Ashrei (happy). The morning service includes a run of psalms called Pesukei d’Zimra, verses of song, ending with Psalms 145 to 150. Each day of the week has its own psalm. The order follows what the Mishnah says the Levites sang in the Temple: Psalm 24 on Sunday, 48 on Monday, and so on to Psalm 92 on Shabbat.

On Friday evening, congregations welcome the Sabbath with Kabbalat Shabbat, receiving the Sabbath. The service, shaped by the kabbalists of Safed in the 16th century, opens with six psalms (95 to 99 and 29) for the six days of the week. Then comes the hymn Lekhah Dodi, and then Psalm 92, headed "A Psalm, a Song. For the sabbath day," and Psalm 93. Many congregations sing these psalms to melodies written in the last hundred years.

On the festivals and on the new moon, Jews recite Hallel, Psalms 113 to 118, as a block. The word means praise. The psalms tell of Israel leaving Egypt (Psalm 114: "When Israel came forth out of Egypt") and of a person saved from distress. Hallel is sung at the Passover seder, where the Mishnah already describes it. Its verses are set to some of the most familiar tunes in Jewish music.

In Chicago, as in every city with a Jewish community, these psalms are sung every week in synagogues of every stream, from Reform congregations on the North Side to Orthodox ones in West Rogers Park. The melodies differ. The words, chanted in Hebrew or read in English, are the same 3,000-year-old poems. A student who learns the shape of a psalm has learned the shape of a large part of Jewish prayer.

Poets in every century have written new psalms by borrowing the form. The medieval Hebrew poets of Spain, such as Judah Halevi (c. 1075 to 1141), wrote poems that were sung in synagogues and built on biblical parallelism. English poets from Philip Sidney to Mary Herbert to John Milton translated and imitated psalms. In 1970 the Jamaican group the Melodians recorded Psalm 137 as "Rivers of Babylon," which became one of the best-selling singles in British history when Boney M. covered it in 1978.

To write in the form, start with the line pair. Write one line. Then write a second that says it again with a difference: sharper, more specific, or turned around. "My homework is a mountain; my weekend is a valley I cannot climb out of." Do not rhyme. Let the meaning rhyme. Three or four pairs in a row make a stanza that sounds like Hebrew poetry even in English.

Then choose one governing image and stay with it, the way Psalm 23 stays with the shepherd. Work out what the image does: a shepherd leads, feeds, defends. Let the verbs come from the image. If you are writing a lament, set up the parts: address, complaint, plea. And then decide where the turn comes and what it says. The turn is the hardest line to write, because the poem has to earn it.

This exercise is not religious practice. It is a way of learning how the poems are built by building one. A student can write a psalm to a place, a person, a memory or an idea. Many public-school classes write "psalms" about their city or their family. The point is to feel from the inside why a form that has no rhyme and no fixed meter has lasted three thousand years.

The book of Job begins like a folktale. "There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job" (Job 1:1, JPS 1917). He is upright and rich. In the heavenly court, a figure called the Adversary (in Hebrew ha-satan, with the article, a title rather than a name) suggests that Job is good only because he is blessed. God permits the Adversary to test him. Job loses his herds, his servants and his ten children in a single day, and then his health. He says: "the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD" (1:21).

That is the prose frame, chapters 1 and 2. Three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, come to sit with him in silence for seven days. Then, at chapter 3, the prose stops and the book becomes poetry for 39 chapters. Job curses the day of his birth. The friends answer. Job answers back. Round after round, the friends insist that suffering must be punishment and Job insists that he has done nothing to deserve this. A fourth speaker, Elihu, appears in chapters 32 to 37. Then God answers from a whirlwind (38 to 41), and Job falls silent.

The last chapter returns to prose. God tells the friends that they "have not spoken of Me the thing that is right, as My servant Job hath" (42:7). Job’s fortunes are restored twofold, he has ten more children, and he dies old. Many readers find the ending troubling: can new children replace lost ones? Others read the frame as a folktale that the poet used deliberately, so that the reader would feel the gap between its neat justice and the poem’s hard questions.

Scholars generally date the book to the Persian period, c. 6th to 4th century BCE, though the folktale may be older. Its Hebrew is the most difficult in the Tanakh, full of rare words, and translations differ widely. In the Jewish order of the Ketuvim, Job stands with Psalms and Proverbs as one of the three poetic books, marked in the Masoretic text with a special system of cantillation accents.

The friends are not villains. They say what much of the Tanakh says: God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. Eliphaz asks who ever perished being innocent (4:7). Bildad says that if Job’s children sinned, they died for it (8:4). Zophar says God is punishing Job less than he deserves (11:6). Scholars call their position retribution theology. It is the view of Proverbs, of Deuteronomy’s blessings and curses, and of many psalms. The book of Job sets that view in the mouths of men sitting beside a friend who has lost everything.

Job refuses it. He does not deny that God is powerful. He denies that his suffering is fair, and he demands a hearing. In chapter 31 he swears a long oath of innocence and signs it, as if filing a legal complaint: let the Almighty answer me. Chapter 28, a poem about where wisdom is found, seems to interrupt the argument and may be a later addition. Chapters 32 to 37 bring Elihu, who is angry at everyone and whom no one answers; many scholars think his speeches were also inserted later.

Then God speaks, out of a whirlwind. What follows is not an explanation. It is questions. "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (38:4). Who shut in the sea with doors? Who gives the raven its food? Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook? For four chapters God describes a creation full of wild things that have nothing to do with human beings: the wild donkey, the ostrich, the war horse, the hawk. Job answers that he is small and will say no more (40:4-5), and then, after the second speech, that he had spoken of things too wonderful for him (42:3).

Readers have long disagreed about what the whirlwind means. Some hear a rebuke: who are you to ask? Some hear a gift: God has answered, and the answer is presence, not reasons. Some hear a shift of the question: the universe is not organized around human deserving, and Job’s demand for a fair account was the wrong demand. The book does not decide. It gives the friends’ theology, Job’s protest and God’s questions, and then, in the epilogue, says Job spoke rightly.

Job is not an Israelite. The book never mentions the Torah, the covenant or Jerusalem. That made the rabbis ask when he lived and whether he lived at all. The Talmud (Bava Batra 15a-b) records a long debate. Some sages placed Job in the time of Jacob, others in the time of Moses, others in the days of the return from Babylon. And one opinion, attributed there to a sage, holds that Job never existed and never was created; the book is a mashal, a parable. Another rabbi objects that the book gives his name and his country, and the argument goes on.

Moses Maimonides (1138 to 1204), the great philosopher and legal authority, took the parable reading and built on it. In the Guide of the Perplexed (part 3, chapters 22 and 23) he argues that the book is a parable about providence. Each friend, he says, represents a different philosophical view of how God governs the world. In Maimonides’ reading, Job’s error was that he was righteous but not wise. He gains knowledge of God through the whirlwind speech. That knowledge, not restored wealth, is his real reward.

Other readers stayed with the suffering. The Talmud calls the friends’ seven days of silence a model for comforting mourners: one does not speak until the mourner speaks. Jewish law follows this in the practice of shiva. Rashi and other commentators worked to make the difficult Hebrew readable line by line. Modern Jewish readers after the Holocaust, such as Elie Wiesel, have returned to Job as the one biblical figure who argues with God and is told he spoke rightly.

Christian readers, for comparison, often read Job’s words in 19:25, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," as pointing to resurrection. That follows the King James rendering. Jewish commentators read the verse as Job’s confidence that a vindicator will defend his case. The JPS 1917 keeps "Redeemer" with that different sense. The same verse carries different hopes in the two traditions, and the book’s difficult Hebrew leaves room for both.

"Vanity of vanities, saith Koheleth; vanity of vanities, all is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2, JPS 1917). So opens the book of Ecclesiastes, whose Hebrew name is Kohelet. The word seems to mean one who gathers, perhaps an assembly speaker, and the Greek translators rendered it Ecclesiastes, a member of the assembly. The first verse calls him son of David, king in Jerusalem, and tradition identifies him with Solomon. Scholars date the book’s Hebrew to the Persian or early Greek period, c. 4th or 3rd century BCE, partly because of Persian loanwords.

The key word is hevel. It appears about 38 times in twelve chapters. Its plain meaning is breath, vapor, mist: something real but weightless, gone as soon as you try to hold it. The JPS 1917 and the King James have "vanity." The New JPS translation of 1985 chose "futility." Robert Alter (2010) translates "mere breath." Each choice shifts the book. "Vanity" sounds like a moral judgment. "Breath" sounds like an observation about how long anything lasts.

Kohelet reports what he tried. He built houses and gardens, gathered silver and gold, studied wisdom and folly. He found that the wise die like the fool, that the same fate comes to the righteous and the wicked, that a person cannot know what will come after. He watched the sun rise and set and the rivers run to the sea without filling it. "There is no new thing under the sun" (1:9).

And yet the book is not simply gloomy. Seven times, in slightly different words, Kohelet says that there is nothing better for a person than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in work (2:24, 3:12-13, 3:22, 5:17, 8:15, 9:7-9, 11:9). Some readers hear resignation. Others hear the book’s real advice: because life is breath, the ordinary goods, bread, wine, work, a companion, sunlight, are the things to hold. Both readings are in the text, and the book lets them stand side by side.

The best-known passage in Ecclesiastes is the poem that opens chapter 3. "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven" (3:1, JPS 1917). Then come fourteen pairs. A time to be born and a time to die, to plant and to uproot, to kill and to heal. To break down and to build up, to weep and to laugh, to mourn and to dance. The list is antithetic parallelism stretched over eight verses. The harsh word and the gentle word trade places from line to line.

Readers hear the poem in different ways. Read aloud at a funeral, it can sound like comfort: everything has its time. Read in its place in the book, it is followed by a sharp question in verse 9. "What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?" If the times are not ours to choose, what does anyone gain? Kohelet’s answer, in verses 12 and 13, is once more the ordinary goods. Rejoice, do good, eat, drink, enjoy your labor, for that is the gift of God.

Verse 11 contains one of the book’s hardest and most quoted phrases. God, it says, has made everything beautiful in its time. God has also set the world in the human heart. Yet no one can find out the work God does from beginning to end. The Hebrew word rendered "world" (olam) can also mean eternity or a hidden thing, and translations differ. Whatever the word means, the verse pairs a sense of the whole with an inability to grasp it. That is close to the book’s whole argument in one line.

The passage became a folk song when Pete Seeger set its words to music in the late 1950s as "Turn! Turn! Turn!" and the Byrds took it to the top of the American charts in 1965. Seeger added only a few words of his own at the end. A poem written more than two thousand years ago about time became, in a decade of war, a song about peace, which is itself a small lesson in how readers make a text their own.

Chapter 12 begins with a poem about old age and death written in riddling images. The keepers of the house tremble. The grinders cease because they are few. The silver cord snaps and the golden bowl breaks. The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it (12:1-7). Then the book repeats its first line: vanity of vanities, all is vanity (12:8). That is where Kohelet’s own voice seems to end.

Verses 9 to 14 speak about Kohelet in the third person. He was wise, they say; he taught the people, weighed and arranged many proverbs. Then a warning against too many books and too much study, and a closing verse: "The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole man" (12:13, JPS 1917). Most scholars read these verses as an epilogue added by an editor who wanted to frame the book’s doubts inside traditional piety. Traditional readers take the ending as the book’s own conclusion.

The ending mattered. The Mishnah (Yadayim 3:5) records that the school of Shammai did not consider Ecclesiastes sacred Scripture, while the school of Hillel did. The Talmud (Shabbat 30b) reports that the sages considered hiding the book because its words contradict each other, and decided against it because its beginning and its end are words of Torah. In effect, the epilogue helped keep the book. Whether that was the editor’s intention or a later reading, the tradition chose to keep a book that argues with itself.

Ecclesiastes is read in the synagogue on the Sabbath of Sukkot, the autumn harvest festival when Jews eat in temporary booths. Readers have offered several reasons. The festival is a season of joy, and the book warns joy not to forget that everything passes. The booth is a fragile house, and the book is about fragile things. Whatever the reason, once a year a book that calls everything breath is chanted in a hut open to the wind.

The book of Esther is set in Shushan (Susa), a capital of the Persian empire. The king is called Ahasuerus in Hebrew. Most scholars identify him with Xerxes I, who reigned 486 to 465 BCE. The story itself is generally dated later, to the 4th or 3rd century BCE. The king holds a feast and summons his queen Vashti to display her beauty. When she refuses, he banishes her. A search for a new queen brings in Esther, a young Jewish woman raised by her cousin Mordecai. He tells her to hide her people.

Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman, the king’s chief minister. Haman, enraged, plans to destroy not one man but all the Jews of the empire, and casts lots (purim) to choose the day. Mordecai learns of the decree and sends Esther a message: "who knoweth whether thou art not come to royal estate for such a time as this?" (4:14, JPS 1917). Esther agrees to approach the king uninvited, at risk of death: "and if I perish, I perish" (4:16). She asks the Jews of Shushan to fast three days.

Then the reversals begin. On the very night Haman builds a gallows for Mordecai, the king cannot sleep and has the royal chronicles read to him, and hears how Mordecai once saved his life. Haman is made to lead Mordecai through the city in royal robes. At Esther’s second banquet she reveals that she is Jewish and names Haman as the enemy. Haman is hanged on his own gallows. The chapter that turns everything is chapter 6, which begins with a sleepless king.

The Hebrew book never names God. There is no prayer, no Temple, no miracle, only coincidence, courage and timing. The Greek version, preserved in the Septuagint, adds more than a hundred verses, including prayers by Mordecai and Esther that name God repeatedly. Jewish tradition kept the Hebrew. The rabbis pointed to "from another place" in 4:14 as a veiled reference to God, and to the name Esther itself, which sounds like the Hebrew for "I will hide" (Deuteronomy 31:18). Modern readers see a book about a God who works, if at all, behind the scenes.

Esther 9:20-28 describes Mordecai writing to the Jews of the empire. They are to keep the fourteenth and fifteenth of Adar every year as days of feasting and gladness. They are to send portions to one another and gifts to the poor. Those verses are the source of the holiday of Purim, named for the lots Haman cast. Rabbinic law, set out in the Talmud’s tractate Megillah, draws four duties from the chapter. Hear the Megillah read. Send gifts of food to friends. Give to the poor. Eat a festive meal.

The Megillah is read twice, on the evening and the morning of Purim, from a handwritten scroll. The reader chants it in a special tune, and at four verses of deliverance the congregation reads aloud first. At Haman’s name, the noise begins. The custom of drowning the name is first recorded in medieval Europe and is connected to Deuteronomy 25:19, the command to blot out Amalek, since Haman is called an Agagite and Agag was Amalek’s king in 1 Samuel 15. On the Sabbath before Purim, that passage from Deuteronomy is read in synagogue as a special reading.

Purim is the one day in the Jewish year given over to laughter. The Talmud (Megillah 7b) records a rabbi’s saying about drinking on Purim. One should drink, it says, until unable to tell "cursed be Haman" from "blessed be Mordecai." Later rabbis softened that line in many ways. Costumes, masks and the Purim spiel, a comic play retelling the story, grew up in Europe from the Middle Ages onward. Many readers connect the costumes to the book’s theme of hiding. Esther hides her people, God’s name is hidden, and for one day everyone hides behind a mask.

In Chicago, Purim carnivals fill synagogue gyms and Jewish day schools each Adar. Hamantaschen, three-cornered pastries filled with poppy seed or fruit, appear in bakeries across the city. A student who has read the scroll closely will notice how much of the party is a commentary. The noise is Deuteronomy. The gifts are Esther 9:22. The costumes are chapter 4’s secret.

The book does not end with Haman’s hanging. Under Persian law, the king’s first decree cannot be revoked, so a second decree lets the Jews defend themselves on the day set for their destruction. Chapter 9 reports the result. In Shushan the Jews kill 500 men and Haman’s ten sons; Esther asks for a second day, and 300 more are killed. In the provinces the count is 75,000. Three times the text says they did not take plunder. The chapter ends with the founding of Purim.

Readers have handled chapter 9 in different ways. Within the book, the numbers are part of the pattern of reversal. Esther 9:1 says that the day meant for the enemies to overpower the Jews was turned about. Some literary readers treat the chapter as the tale’s revenge fantasy, written by and for a powerless minority. They note the refusal of plunder as a signal that this is not a war of conquest. Historians find no outside record of the events. They generally read the book as a story rather than a chronicle.

Jewish tradition has been alert to the chapter’s weight. The Megillah reader chants the names of Haman’s ten sons in a single breath, a custom explained in several ways, one being that one should not dwell on the death of enemies. In some communities the noise at Haman’s name has been discouraged as excess. Rabbinic and modern Jewish teachers have also stressed that Purim’s joy is about deliverance, not about killing, and have warned against reading the chapter as license.

The book of Esther has also been used against Jews. Martin Luther is recorded as saying he wished the book did not exist, and some Christian readers have pointed to chapter 9 as evidence of Jewish vengefulness. Jewish and many Christian scholars answer that the chapter belongs to a story about a threatened people, that it is read inside a tradition that argues with it, and that no text should be read as a verdict on a living community. The chapter stays. So does the argument about it.

Put the three books side by side. Job says the innocent suffer and gets no reason. Ecclesiastes says everything is breath and then blesses bread and wine. Esther tells of a deliverance in which God is never mentioned. None of the three ends the way a reader expects. None of the three tells the reader what to think. Each was questioned by the rabbis: was Job real, should Ecclesiastes be hidden, does Esther "make the hands unclean"? Each was kept.

The three books share a way of working. They put more than one voice on the page and refuse to silence any of them. Job’s friends are wrong, the epilogue says, but their speeches are still there, thirty chapters of them. Kohelet contradicts himself, and the editor’s last line does not erase the contradictions. Esther’s laughter and Esther’s ninth chapter sit in the same scroll. A reader has to decide, and the text does not decide for the reader.

Jewish tradition has a name for reading this way: machloket, argument for the sake of heaven. Pirkei Avot 5:17 says that a dispute for the sake of heaven will endure, like the disputes of Hillel and Shammai. The Talmud is built out of such arguments, and it read these three books the same way, preserving opinions that disagree. That habit is one reason a public-school course can study these books at all. They were written and kept by people who expected to argue about them.

The Ketuvim end, in the Jewish order, with Chronicles and a call to go up to Jerusalem. But the three books in this chapter show what the Writings are for along the way. They are the part of the Tanakh where the people talk back: to suffering, to time and to power. What a student takes from them is not an answer but a practice, reading closely, holding two readings at once and saying, with reasons, which one holds.