Esther and Herodotus: the main characters

The first main character of the book of Esther is, of course, Esther herself. There is no record of Esther in history,  outside of the bible. That is not surprising. Why should there be? If she actually existed, she would not have been important to anyone but the Jews. We will see later that her position in the palace was not as exalted as is usually assumed. If she existed, her name may not even have been Esther. Many characters in bible stories are given symbolic names that have meaning attached to the story being told.

In spite of being the main character, Esther does not appear in the story till chapter two, after the stage is set. There we learn that her father and mother were dead. She was brought up by her cousin Mordecai, as his daughter. Mordecai and Esther were Jews living in Susa, Persia (Modern day Iran). They were three generations from Kish, their great grandfather of the tribe of Benjamin, "who had been carried into exile from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar." We will talk about that more later.

Esther's original Hebrew name was Hadassah. Her Persian name, Esther, may mean star or could be derived from the name of the goddess Ishtar, who was also known as the queen of heaven. Please read the linked article on Ishtar/Inanna. I consider it quite possible that the name Esther is in fact a deliberate association with the goddess. Perhaps Yahweh is never mentioned in the book because it is actually meant to be a way that the Hebrews, who were forbidden to worship the Queen of heaven, could obliquely honor Ishtar without getting in trouble with the Hebrew priests. Perhaps they attributed their salvation during the Persian era of their exile to the goddess. It is important to remember that religions were not so firmly separated and delineated in ancient times as they are now.

Esther is said to be very good looking, "lovely in form and feature," which is a key element to the story because her beauty gets her into the palace of the king, Xerxes I, our other main character. There is plenty of extrabiblical source material for this man. Xerxes, called Ahasuerus in the Hebrew bible, was son of Darius and king of Persia from 486-465 BCE. There is some dispute as to whether the Ahasuerus of the Hebrew scriptures actually was Xerxes  I, but for the purposes of this study we will assume they are one and the same. We will see that the historian Herodotus's description of Xerxes seems to mesh quite well with what the bible tells us.