If Achashverosh Is Xerxes, Is Esther His Wife Amestris?

How do the names in the book of Esther correlate with those we know from Persian history? Do some of them refer to the historical personages described in the Greek sources of Herodotus and Ctesias?

Mitchell First

If Achashverosh Is Xerxes, Is Esther His Wife Amestris? — Xerxes at Hellespont Jean Adrien Guignet (1816 – 54)

List of Persian Kings from the Relevant Biblical Period^[1]

Cyrus
Cambyses
Darius I
Xerxes
Artaxerxes I

539-530

530-522

522-486

486-465

465-424^[3]

Darius II
Artaxerxes II
Artaxerxes III
Arses
Darius III

423-404

404-358

358-338

338-336

336-332

Achashverosh

The Megillah does not mention the names of the kings who preceded or followed Achashverosh.^[2] This deprives us of a context for his reign. But an Achashverosh is mentioned one time in the fourth chapter of the book of Ezra in the context of other Persian kings. The chapter discusses the permission Koresh (Cyrus) gives to rebuild the Temple (Ezra 4:4-7).^[4]

ד וַֽיְהִי֙ עַם־הָאָ֔רֶץ מְרַפִּ֖ים יְדֵ֣י עַם־יְהוּדָ֑ה ומבלהים (וּֽמְבַהֲלִ֥ים) אוֹתָ֖ם לִבְנֽוֹת׃

4 Then the people of the land weakened the hands of the people of Judah, and harried them while they were building.

ה וְסֹֽכְרִ֧ים עֲלֵיהֶ֛ם יֽוֹעֲצִ֖ים לְהָפֵ֣ר עֲצָתָ֑ם כָּל־יְמֵ֗י כּ֚וֹרֶשׁ מֶ֣לֶךְ פָּרַ֔ס וְעַד־מַלְכ֖וּת דָּֽרְיָ֥וֶשׁ מֶֽלֶךְ־פָּרָֽס׃

5 They hired counsellors against them, to frustrate their purpose, all the days of Koresh, king of Persia, even until the reign of Daryavesh, king of Persia.[5]

ו וּבְמַלְכוּת֙ אֲחַשְׁוֵר֔וֹשׁ בִּתְחִלַּ֖ת מַלְכוּת֑וֹ כָּֽתְב֣וּ שִׂטְנָ֔ה עַל־יֹֽשְׁבֵ֥י יְהוּדָ֖ה וִירֽוּשָׁלִָֽם׃

6 In the reign of Achashverosh, in the beginning of his reign, they wrote an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem.

ז וּבִימֵ֣י אַרְתַּחְשַׁ֗שְׂתָּא כָּתַ֨ב בִּשְׁלָ֜ם מִתְרְדָ֤ת טָֽבְאֵל֙ וּשְׁאָ֣ר כְּנָֽו‍ֹתָ֔ו…

7 In the days of Artachshasta, wrote Bishlam, Mitredat, Tavel and the rest of his companions…[6]

According to this, Achashverosh reigned between Daryavesh (=Darius I), during whose reign the Temple was rebuilt (see Ezra 6:15), and Artachshasta (=Artaxerxes I).^[7] This suggests that Achashverosh is to be identified with Xerxes.^[8]

The Linguistic Connection between Xerxes and Achashverosh

But why would Achashverosh be referred to by the Greeks as Xerxes? The answer to this question had to wait until the nineteenth century, when scholars first deciphered Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions from the ancient Persian palaces,^[9] and the Old Persian form of his name was revealed to be “Khshayarsha.”^[10]

Explaining the Hebrew

Khshayarsha is very close to the Hebrew “Achashverosh.” In their consonantal structure, the two names are identical. Both center on the consonantal sounds “ch,” “sh,” “r,” and “sh.” The Hebrew added an initial aleph, referred to by linguists as a “prosthetic aleph,”^[11] a frequent occurrence when foreign words with two initial consonants are recorded in Hebrew. The Hebrew also exchanged the “y” sound for a vav.^[12]

At the beginning of the 20^th century, Aramaic documents from Elephantine in Egypt, dating to the 5^th century B.C.E., came to light. In these documents, this king’s name was spelled in Aramaic as חשירש, חשיארש and^[13] אחשירש, forms very close to the Hebrew אחשורוש.

Explaining the Greek

But how did Khshayarsha (consonants: KH, SH, R, SH) come to be referred to by the Greeks as Xerxes?

The Greek language does not have a letter to represent the “sh” sound. (Greek usually transliterates this sound as S.)

The initial “KH SH” sounds of the Persian name were collapsed into one Greek letter that makes the “KS” sound. A tendency to assimilation probably led to the second “SH” also becoming “KS,” even though “S” would have been more appropriate.^[14]Hence, the consonants became KS, R, KS (=X, R, X).

The “es” at the end typifies a foreign name in proper Greek grammatical form.^[15](For this same reason, the Hebrew משה became “Moses” in Greek.)

Thus, linguistically speaking, identifying Khshayarsha with the Greek Xerxes and the Hebrew Achashverosh is accepted by contemporary scholars. Whether Khshayarsha did all the things attributed to him in the Megillah—or in Herodotus for that matter—is a different question.^[16]

Esther

In the Megillah, Achashverosh marries Vashti and then Esther. Unfortunately, we have no Persian inscriptions with the queen’s name, as we do for the king, so we are limited to information (accurate or not) from Greek historians.

Amestris and Esther – Variants of the Same Name

The Greek historians Herodotus and Ctesias refer to Xerxes’ wife as Amestris. Although some slight linguistic connection between the name Amestris and the name Vashti (Persian “sht” to Greek “st”) seems possible, a stronger connection exists between the Greek Amestris and the Hebrew Esther:

The “is” at the end is just a Greek suffix added to turn the foreign name into proper Greek grammatical form (just as “es” was added at the end of “Xerxes”).

The name Amestris is based around the consonants M, S, T, and R, and the name as recorded in the Megillah is based around the consonants S, T, and R.

Very likely, this is not coincidence; perhaps her Persian name was composed of the consonants M, S, T, and R, and the M was not preserved in the Hebrew.

Assuming that Esther is to be identified with Amestris, what do the sources tell us about this person?

Amestris: Wife of Xerxes – Herodotus

The 5^th century BCE Greek historian, Herodotus, refers to Xerxes’ wife Amestris in three contexts:

In his detailed account of Xerxes’ invasion force against Greece, the Persian contingent of the army was commanded by Otanes, who was the father of Xerxes’ wife Amestris (VII:61).^[17]
After mentioning that Xerxes’ invasion force entered a town called Nine Ways, he writes:

There, learning that Nine Ways was the name of the place, they [=the Persians] buried alive that number of boys and maidens, children of the people of the country. To bury alive is a Persian custom; I have heard that when Xerxes’ wife Amestris attained to old age she buried fourteen sons of notable Persians, as a thanks-offering on her own behalf to the fabled god of the nether world (VII:114).^[18]

He tells a story depicting the cruelty of Amestris. The following is a brief outline of the story:

While at Sardis, Xerxes fell in love with the wife of his brother Masistes. (Sardis was where Xerxes resided temporarily after he began his retreat from his invasion of Greece but before he returned to Susa.) The wife of Masistes rejects his advances. Xerxes then arranges a marriage between his son Darius and the daughter of Masistes, thinking that this would eventually help him seduce the mother. The story continues at Susa, with the exact time of the continuation unspecified.^[19] In the continuation, Amestris gives Xerxes a beautiful robe that wove with her own hands. By this time, Xerxes had transferred his affections to the daughter, now married to his son Darius, and Xerxes had an affair with her. Xerxes ends up giving the daughter the robe.

When Amestris finds out, she takes revenge on the mother.^[20]She sends for the soldiers of the royal bodyguard and has the mother mutilated. Many of her body parts are ordered cut off and are thrown to the dogs. When Masistes sees what was done to his wife, he decides to stir up a revolt against Xerxes. In the end, Xerxes’ forces kill Masistes, his sons, and all the men under his command (IX:108-113).

Amestris: Wife of Xerxes – Ctesias

A later Greek historian, Ctesias (writing shortly after 400 B.C.E.)^[21] who served as a physician to Artaxerxes II also writes about Amestris.^[22] From him, we learn the following.

Amestris outlives Xerxes and dies after she has “grown very old.”

After years of pestering, Amestris is finally able to convince her son Artaxerxes to let her avenge the death of another son Achaemenides. She is able to have fifty Greeks decapitated and their leader Inarus impaled, in revenge for Inarus and his men having slain Achaemenides five years earlier, when Inarus had led a revolt.^[23]

She is given the authority by Artaxerxes to punish a physician who deceived her daughter Amytis into having sexual relations with him; she orders him kept in chains and tortured for two months, and eventually buried alive.^[24]

She was frequently intimate with men^[25] and is depicted either as licentious or perhaps even as a nymphomaniac.

She orders the murderer of her grandchild impaled.

She is able to convince Artaxerxes to forgive Amytis’ husband Megabyzus on various occasions.

The Cruel Amestris and the Pious Esther?

Clearly, Herodotus and Ctesias depict Amestris as cruel. It should be noted, however, that many scholars today doubt the stories told by the Greek historians about their enemies the Persians; those concerning royal Persian women are particularly suspect.^[26]

Esther’s Father

The biblical and Greek accounts differ with regard to the identity of the queen’s father. In Herodotus, she is the daughter of a military commander named Otanes.^[27] In the Megillah, she is the daughter of a Jewish man named Avichayil.^[28] These names cannot be connected phonologically, yet it is striking that the name Avichayil contains the element “ח-י-ל,” which has a military connotation and means “strength” or “soldier.”

Mordechai

In an introductory statement about the reign of Xerxes, after mentioning two of Xerxes’ influential advisors, Ctesias writes that “among the eunuchs,^[29] Natacas (Nατακας) exercised the greatest influence.”^[30]A few lines later, he refers to a eunuch of Xerxes named Matacas (Ματακας). These two names likely reflect the same person.^[31]

The “as” at the end of either name is almost certainly a Greek addition. Thus, “Matacas” suggests a Persian name with the consonants MTC, which would be very close to the consonants of the name Mordechai, MRDC.^[32] Even the name “Natacas” is not significantly different. “N” and “M” are related consonants, both being nasal stops; it is not unusual for one to transform into the other.

With either form of the name, the information provided by Ctesias, that he was a high-ranking official in Xerxes court, bears a strong resemblance to the last verse in the Megillah, which records that by the end of the story, Mordechai wasmishneh (=second) to the king. Thus, the Matacas of Ctesias and the Mordechai of the Megillah may refer to the same historical person.

Finding Correlations When History Is Lost

We have no evidence in Greek or Persian sources for the main plot of the Purim story, the threat to destroy the Jews in the 12th year (3:7), although this is to be expected. No works from any Persian historians from this period have survived, and our main source among the Greek historians for the events of the reign of Xerxes is Herodotus, but his narrative ends in the 7^thyear of Xerxes.^[33] So we are in the dark about virtually everything that happened in Xerxes’ reign after year 7 until his assassination in his 21^st year.^[34]

Nevertheless, it is fascinating that we can identify certainly one, likely two, and perhaps even three of the characters of the Megillah with historical personalities!

View Footnotes

Published 2016-03-17

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].
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.
Another king named Xerxes reigned 45 days after the death of his father Artaxerxes I.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
See Bezalel Porten and Jerome A. Lund, Aramaic Documents from Egypt: A Key-Word-in-Context Concordance(Winona Lake, Ind.: 2002), p. 356.
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!
I.e., convert it into the nominative case.
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).
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.
The translation is from the Loeb edition.
“But as time went on the truth came to light…” (IX,109, Loeb edition).
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
The relevant passage in Photius reads:
Amytis, like her mother Amestris before her, was frequently intimate with men.
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.”
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.
Esther is twice described as the daughter of Avichayil. See Est. 2:15 and 9:29.
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.”
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..
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.
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.”
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.
That Xerxes died by assassination comes from Ctesias and other later sources. It was not reported by Herodotus.