At this point you may be wondering what an atheist is doing, trying to show how secular history and the book of Esther have many points of agreement. Do I believe the events in this story are literally true and historically accurate? Not at all. However, I do think the book of Esther is one of the most clever pieces of historical fiction in the bible. The person writing this knew their subject well. They seem to be extremely familiar with the Persians and their customs. They are also familiar enough with the Hebrew language to make a fascinating variety of puns and other word games, and familiar enough with the canonical Hebrew history to borrow from it while doing their own world building. I think the author knew exactly what he was doing and had a lot of fun doing it. For these reasons, I find Esther one of the most fascinating books in the bible.
Time for some more historical context. Though Mordecai and Esther were considered Jews in exile. They were also third generation Persian Jews, born in Persia. They most likely would have never left the general area they were born and raised in. They might not have wanted to.They most likely would have absorbed a great deal of Persian culture. Before they were born, according to the bible, up to 50,000 Jews had returned to Israel with permission from Cyrus and Darius, Xerxes' grandfather and father. The "second temple" had been built by 516 BCE, probably also before Esther would have been born. The quotation marks are there because there is no clear evidence of the existence of the first temple, supposedly built by Solomon.
The bible depicts the return of the Jews to their home land as happening in four general waves. The third (458 BCE) and fourth (445 BCE) waves happened after the time period of the story of Esther. I would not be surprised if the author of Esther was among the third or fourth wave of immigrant Persian Jews, possibly leaving with Nehemiah, who was supposed to have been a royal cupbearer to the then current king of Persia, Artaxerxes, the son of king Xerxes of the book of Esther. All we really know is the author has a working knowledge of Persian culture and familiarity with the supposed history of the Jewish monarchy recorded in Samuel and Chronicles. He could also have been familiar with Herodotus's works, which would put the book closer to 400 BCE.
Herodotus was born about 486 BCE and wrote his Histories somewhere about 430 BCE, after he had traveled extensively. Strangely, or not, Herodotus does not mention the Jews/ Hebrews/ Israelites at all. In his Histories Volume II, book VII:89, Herotus does mention people from the region of Syria, including those who lived in Palestine. That would have included the area we know as Israel. It has long been my contention that the Israelites/ Jews never were as major a name in the area as the bible makes them out to be. All that area was considered part of the first Persian empire for a while. In fact the Jews may never have been autonomously self governing again, if they ever were.
Many of the people who immigrated to the Palestinian area from various parts of the empire may have ethnically originated from there, but they may not have been religiously united until after the generations of living elsewhere. This seems to be the case in the bible books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and others. The people had to be told what they were to believe. Also, it is possible that a great deal of the Hebrew scriptures were compiled in an attempt to create a unified monotheistic cult of Yahweh that didn't actually exist pre-exile. There were Egyptian Jews with their own yahweh temple in Elephantine, as late as 411 BCE, who seem to have no knowledge of the torah or much of the claimed Jewish pre-exile history. They were also polytheistic.
It is taking me longer than usual to write these posts because of all the research and cross checking. Even so, it is quite possible some of my claims are erroneous. You are free to check anything that sound off to you.
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