If Achashverosh Is Xerxes, Is Esther His Wife Amestris?

[1] The conventional English names for the kings reflect the way these names have come down to us from the Greek historian Herodotus (mid-5th cent B.C.E.) and others after him, who first described these Persian kings to the non-Persian world. Admittedly, the list of kings in the table above does not fit with the view of the Talmud. According to the Talmud (Megillah 11b, based on Seder Olam chap. 29), Achashverosh reigned between Koresh (Cyrus) and Daryavesh (Darius); the Talmud does not know of Cambyses. For more information about this discrepancy, see my Jewish History in Conflict: A Study of the Major Discrepancy Between Rabbinic and Conventional Chronology (Northvale, N.J.: 1997). See also Chaim Milikowsky, Seder Olam: Critical Edition, Commentary, and Introduction (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2013), 462-475 [Hebrew].

[2] The present essay is a summary of a longer essay found in my book, Esther Unmasked: Solving Eleven Mysteries of the Jewish Holidays and Liturgy (Kodesh Press, 2015), 129-167.

[3] Another king named Xerxes reigned 45 days after the death of his father Artaxerxes I.

[4] An Achashverosh is also mentioned in the Bible at Dan. 9:2, as the father of Daryavesh of Medea. In the Bible, Daryavesh of Medea precedes Koresh, but he (Daryavesh of Medea) is almost certainly not a historical figure.

[5] This verse (“they hired counsellors against them…kol yemei Koresh melekh Paras ve-ad malkhut Daryavesh melekh Paras”) implies that one or more kings reigned between Koresh and Daryavesh. If there were no kings between Koresh and Daryavesh, the verse would not have used the word ve-ad(until); it would have referred to the hiring of counselors in the reigns of Koresh and Daryavesh. Cambyses reigned between Koresh and Daryavesh, and his reign is alluded to here. His name was discovered to be “Kabujiya” in Persian and כנבוזי in Aramaic documents from Egypt from the 5^th cent. B.C.E.

[6] This section, describing a complaint made in the reign of Artachshasta about the building of the city of Jerusalem and its walls, continues through verse 23.

[7] This is an oversimplification, since the Daryavesh who rebuilt the Temple is mentioned at both Ezra 4:5 and at Ezra 4:24. See following note.

[8] Verses 4:6-23 are properly understood as a digression. The author supplements the reference to accusations made against the Jews in the reigns of Koresh through Daryavesh with mention of further accusations against them in the reigns of the subsequent kings, Achashverosh (Xerxes) and Artachshasta (Artaxerxes I). Verse 4:24 then returns to the main narrative, the reign of Daryavesh. The role played by verse 4:24 is that of “resumptive repetition.” This is the interpretation adopted by many modern scholars, including in the Daat Mikracommentary to Ezra (pp. 27 and 35). See the references at Richard Steiner, “Bishlam’s Archival Search Report in Nehemiah’s Archive: Multiple Introductions and Reverse Chronological Order as Clues to the Origin of the Aramaic Letters in Ezra 4-6,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125 (2006), p. 674, n. 164. This understanding of verse 24 only became evident in modern times when it was realized that linguistically Achashverosh was to be identified with Xerxes.

[9] The main work in the decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform was done by Henry Rawlinson in the 1830’s and 1840’s. But others had made contributions prior to this. See,e.g., Edwin M. Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible (Grand Rapids: 1990), pp. 134-135, and Robert William Rogers, History of Babylonia and Assyria (New York and Cincinnati: 1900), vol. 1, pp. 46-83. The main text which enabled the decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform, and subsequently of Elamite and Akkadian cuneiform, was a lengthy trilingual text (with an accompanying relief) composed at the instruction of Darius I. It was inscribed on the rockface at Behistun, overlooking a main road leading to Hamadan.

[10] To see what Khshayarsha’s name looked like in Old Persian cuneiform, see, e.g., the photo at Yehuda Landy, Purim and the Persian Empire (Jerusalem: 2010), p. 41.

[11] Both the Elamite and the Akkadian versions of the name Khshayarsha also had an initial vowel. In Elamite, “i”, and in Akkadian, “a.” See Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible, p. 187. The name of the king is found in Aramaic in the panels of the Dura-Europos synagogue (3^rd century C.E., Syria) without the initialaleph.

[12] Interestingly, the Megillah once spells the name without avav, though note that the qeri still reads “Achashverosh.” :וַיָּשֶׂם֩ הַמֶּ֨לֶךְ (אחשרש) [אֲחַשְׁוֵר֧וֹשׁ׀] מַ֛ס עַל־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְאִיֵּ֥י הַיָּֽם

[13] See Bezalel Porten and Jerome A. Lund, Aramaic Documents from Egypt: A Key-Word-in-Context Concordance(Winona Lake, Ind.: 2002), p. 356.

[14] That the transmission of foreign names is by no means an exact science is shown by how the name of the son of Xerxes was recorded by the Greeks. The Greeks preserved the “Arta” of the first part of his name, Artakhshaça, but then just tacked on “xerxes,” the name of his father, as the second part of his name!

[15] I.e., convert it into the nominative case.

[16] According to Herodotus, Xerxes was the son of Darius by Atossa, daughter of Cyrus. Xerxes was also the first son born to Darius after Darius became king. These factors distinguished him from his older half-brother Artabazanes, and merited Xerxes being chosen to succeed Darius. At his accession in 486 BCE, Xerxes could not have been more than 36 years old (since he was born after the accession of Darius in 522 BCE).

[17] This is typically translated as: “they were commanded by Otanes, the father of Xerxes’ wife Amestris.” But the structure of the Greek sentence is ambiguous and may be translated differently: “[t]heir commander was Otanes, father of Xerxes’ wife and son of Amestris.” In this alternate translation, Xerxes’ wife is unnamed, and Amestris is a man. This alternate translation is followed in the Loeb Classical Library edition (ed. A.D. Godley, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1920-25), and in a few other editions. But the only wife of Xerxes that Herodotus ever mentions is Amestris, and it would be too coincidental for the commander to have been the son of someone named Amestris as well. This makes the alternate translation very unlikely. This passage does not necessarily imply that Amestris was already the wife of Xerxes at the time of the invasion.

[18] The translation is from the Loeb edition.

[19] “But as time went on the truth came to light…” (IX,109, Loeb edition).

[20] Herodotus writes (IX,110, Loeb edition):

[W]hen she learnt the truth, her anger was not with the girl;
she supposed rather that the girl’s mother was guilty and that
this was her doing, and so it was Masistes’ wife that she
plotted to destroy.

Exactly what Herodotus means in the passage I have bolded is unclear.

[21] The Persica of Ctesias only survives in quotations or summaries by others. For this particular section of Ctesias, what has survived is a summary by Photius (9^th cent.)

[22] I will refer to the material from Ctesias as if it is coming directly from him, even though it is really coming from the 9^thcentury summary by Photius. All my translations of Ctesias are from Jan P. Stronk, Ctesias’ Persian History, Part I (2010). All the events involving Amestris that are described occur in the reign of her son, Artaxerxes.

[23] The passage in Photius reads:

But Amestris, aggrieved at the idea that Inarus and the Greeks should escape punishment for the death of her son Achaemenides, asked the king [to punish them], but he refused; she then appealed to Megabyzus, who also dismissed her. At last, because she pestered her son, she got what she wanted, and after five years the king gave up Inarus and the Greeks to her. Inarus was impaled on three stakes; fifty of the Greeks, all she could lay her hands on, were decapitated.

[24] The relevant passage in Photius reads:

When Amytis was suffering from a slight illness and not a serious one, the physician Apollonides of Cos, was called in to attend her. He fell in love with her [and] said that in order to recover her health she should entertain relations with men, because the illness was caused by the womb. But when his plan to have intercourse with her had worked out, the health of the woman began to fail and he began to flee the encounters. As she was dying, she implored her mother to requite Apollonides, and Amestris in turn informed the king: how Apollonides had had intercourse with Amytis, how he had fled the debased Amytis, and how her daughter had urged her to requite Apollonides. The king left the mother to do as she pleased with the offender. She seized Apollonides and kept him in chains for two months while she tortured him and then buried him alive on the same day that Amytis died.

[25] The relevant passage in Photius reads:

Amytis, like her mother Amestris before her, was frequently intimate with men.

[26] See, e.g., Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, “Exit Atossa: Images of Women in Greek Historiography on Persia,” in Averil Cameron and Amélie Kuhrt, eds., Images of Women in Antiquity (Detroit: 1983). At p. 32, for example, Sancisi-Weerdenburg writes: “It is time, I think, to liberate ourselves from the Greek view on Persian history. The notorious women in this history should be confined to their real place, that is in literature.”

[27] Herodotus (3:84) tells of an agreement between Darius I and his six co-conspirators—he was a usurper, hence the co-conspirators—that the Persian king would not marry outside their families. One of the co-conspirators was named Otanes. Could this be the same person? Herodotus nowhere states that the Otanes, father of Amestris, was the co-conspirator Otanes. Pierre Briant, one of the foremost scholars of this period, writes that if Amestris had been the daughter of co-conspirator Otanes, Herodotus would doubtless have pointed this out. Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander (Winona Lake, Ind.: 2002), p. 135. If he is correct, then Xerxes broke his father’s oath and married outside the seven families.

[28] Esther is twice described as the daughter of Avichayil. See Est. 2:15 and 9:29.

[29] In many instances, this seems to have been merely a term used to indicate a holder of a high position in the king’s entourage. See Briant, pp. 274-77, who concludes that it is “highly doubtful that all of the counselors and intimates of the Great Kings whom Ctesias and others call eunuchs were castrated men.”

[30] Ctesias had just mentioned “the aged Mardonius” as an influential advisor to Xerxes. But Mordechai cannot be Mardonius. Herodotus had told us that Mardonius was Darius’ nephew and son-in-law, and was a general in the invasion of Greece by Darius. Mardonius encouraged Xerxes to undertake his own invasion..

[31] Textual corruption could have arisen in the manuscripts of Photius, or could already have been present in the text of Ctesias that Photius used. Or Photius himself may have erred, writing or dictating in haste. There are many manuscripts of Photius, but all derive from two. Both of these read “Natacas” in the first passage and “Matacas” in the second passage.

[32] Elision of an R before another consonant is not uncommon. Neither is the exchange of D and T.

A contemporary parallel is that the name MORDechai is often shortened to “MOTI.”

[33] In his narrative of events up to the 7^th year, Herodotus does make some tangential references to events after the 7^thyear. For example, he refers to Artaxerxes a few times, and he tells a story about something that Amestris did in her later years: she had fourteen children of noble Persians buried alive, as a gift on her behalf to the god of the nether world.

[34] That Xerxes died by assassination comes from Ctesias and other later sources. It was not reported by Herodotus.