Already before Antiochus IV's persecution of the Jews, meaning that probably already back under Persian rule, the Judean populace celebrated the early-spring holiday of the fourteenth–fifteenth of the twelfth month – known as Purim (Esther 9:31) or as Mordecai’s Day (2 Maccabees 15:36[1]). The twelfth month was the month of hoeing weeds and of gathering them alongside legumes and other assorted hay crops.[2] The legumes were used to feed livestock and were eaten by the abject poor as protein substitutes for meat, fish, and eggs. The hay crops and grasses were used to feed the livestock and during times of fasting were cooked and eaten even by people. Meaning, in a year in which poor farmers cried over their starving children as they necessarily sowed much of their stored grain for the coming year (Psalms 126:5), those farmers ate grasses. And Purim/Mordecai’s Day was the populace's populist holiday for the celebrating the arrival of this new animal and desperate-people food. It was a carnival.
Indeed, the story associated with the holiday – the Book of Esther story of Esther, Mordecai, and a full pantheon of figures – is a carnivalesque story about surviving hunger. It is a story about the feasting and decadent top echelons of the Persian empire allowing the populace to exterminate one ethnic group – a phenomenon that occurs when the populace faces shortages. In parallel to the reality that poor girls get prostituted in years of famine, it is a carnivalesque story of multitudes of young women getting taken by a foreign king only for the Judean woman to become a queen. It is a wishful story of finding wealth, with the Judean woman becoming a queen who shares power and wealth with her fraternal family – even as the empire raises taxes.
[1]
Inasmuch as 2 Maccabees was completed not long after this calendar change, in
around 130 BCE (following Schwartz D. 2008, 11), and that there were no
political events that in the interim that would have led to the creation of a
holiday on this date, we can say the following.
2 Maccabee’s passing or anchoring reference to this holiday as a known
event, dates this holiday to before the Zadokite calendar change.
[2]
See the farming-cycle Gezer Tablet's/Gezer Calendar's depiction of the
agricultural labor for the month before the barley month. For our
interpretation of that depiction, see Torczyner 1946, 4; Talmon 1963, 182-187; Borowski
1987, 29; Inbar 1990, 363.
[3] After
all, the Zadokites were the powerful group in their society – against which the
holiday's story could be viewed as a scathing allegory. After all, the
Zadokites could have argued that the Book of Esther is a late work.
After all, the Zadokites could have argued that any popular holiday that does
not involve Temple worship is forbidden.
[4] Vanderkam 2001b, 208.
[5] This is reflected further in the reality no copy of the Book of
Esther was found among the works stored near Qumran (contra Talmon 1995,
265 and Schiffman 2007, 236 who regard that lack as a happenstance). While one
could argue that the opposition to the Book of Esther was due to
an ideological condemnation of Esther’s marriage with a Gentile (Eisenman and
Wise 1992, 100; Kalimi 2004, 101–106), the 14 Adar date in Esther was itself
problematic (Jarick 1997, 181) and more immediately relevant.
