Mordechai, Esther, and her Father’s House

It is often overlooked that the Scroll of Esther’s second lead doesn’t have a much of a speaking role. The Persian Queen’s cousin-mentor Mordechai plays a large role in the plot, of course. He foils Bigtan and Teresh’s plot to assassinate King Ahasuerus, and he tells Esther not to reveal her Israelite identity when she is competing to replace the deposed Vashti as queen.

But the text records only one instance of direct speech. That is, the reader is informed a few times that Mordechai spoke, but hears his actual words only once.

In the fourth chapter, as the specter of Haman’s decree to destroy the Jews looms, we are informed:

Mordecai had this message delivered to Esther, “Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape by being in the king’s palace. On the contrary, if you keep silent in this crisis, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another place, while you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows, perhaps you have attained to royal position for just such a time as this.”

Many pious readers have taken Mordechai’s “deliverance . . . from another place” to be an allusion to God (who is, famously, never mentioned in this biblical book). Far fewer pause to ponder the subsequent clause, “you and your father’s house will perish.” Why wouldn’t whoever ends up saving the day also save the Jewish queen? And, since all we know about Esther is that she was a beautiful orphan, what was her “father’s house”? Her only living relative is Mordechai himself. And if he is talking about himself in this odd way, the first question doubles back. Under what plausible scenario wouldn’t Shushan’s most publicly visible member of the tribe, survive when the Jews are rescued?—Mordechai’s sole quoted line, then, doesn’t seem to make sense.

In her JPS commentary to the Book of Esther Adele Berlin writes:

Mordecai’s words appear deficient in logic, for who was left of Esther’s father’s house except perhaps Mordecai? However, it is not a question of logic, but of rhetoric. Mordecai wants to personalize the danger to Esther . . . to bring home the danger to [her]self and [her] closest kin in an immediate way.

In other words, it was just hyperbole in a desperate attempt to spur Esther into action. This isn’t very satisfying. How does it “personalize the danger” to speak of a “father’s house” that doesn’t exist, instead of just saying that they’ll both die.

The contemporary scholar Yitzhak Berger sees in Mordechai’s words not an emotional flourish but a political argument. Haman, we are told was an Agagite, and Mordechai and Esther were from the tribe of Benjamin. Six centuries earlier the Benjaminite King Saul spared Agag, king of Amalek, against the express direction of God and the prophet Samuel, and was stripped of his kingdom for this misplaced mercy. So Mordechai wasn’t just making an odd rhetorical flourish, he was, Berger writes, “redeeming the Benjaminite line from its association with the inadequacies of Saul—particularly in fighting Amalek.” Moreover, Esther and Mordechai’s ancestor Saul had been replaced by the more worthy David; now Esther, who herself had replaced the unworthy Vashti, could flip the script of her father’s Benjaminite house. Mordechai was reminding her that this was an opportunity not only to save herself and her people but to salvage their ancestor’s political legacy.

Rabbi Moshe Alshich noted the same intertextual connection some five hundred years earlier, but he rendered the insight in a more spiritual key. Alshich writes of Mordechai’s curious reference to Esther’s “father’s house”:

The explanation is connected to the idea that Haman’s rise to power stemmed from King Saul’s sin regarding Agag, whom he left alive. From this, Haman ultimately emerged. It was therefore necessary for salvation to come through Esther, who was a descendant of Saul. Mordechai’s statement implies that if salvation were to arise for the Jews from another source, Esther and her father’s house would be lost due to Shaul’s unresolved sin, which would not be atoned for.

If Esther failed to act, the salvation of the Jewish people would, indeed, come from “another place,” but it would not cleanse the metaphysical stain that had remained on the house of Benjamin ever since Saul’s failure.

Alshich was a Sephardi kabbalist, who studied with Rabbi Yosef Karo, taught Rabbi Chaim Vital and eventually lived in sixteenth-century Safed, where they took the correction of souls, ancient and contemporary, very seriously. But one need not read Mordechai’s lines as politics or mysticism to appreciate the biblical significance of his allusion—and the desire to repair the legacy of one’s great-great Zeidy.