Purim Torah

Purim is a lighthearted holiday, and in the twelfth century, Jews in Provence and Italy did a surprisingly lighthearted thing: they began to write entirely new Purim stories. The texts were written in biblical Hebrew and featured imaginary Jewish kings and prophets with funny names. These parodies mimicked the bible not only in language, but in format, and terminology, even cantillation. But they were all about drinking and feasting at the Purim banquet.

The first such proto-Purim spiel Bible known to us is Sefer Habakbuk. It was written in 1332 by the great Provençal philosopher, astronomer, and biblical commentator Gersonides (R. Levi ben Gershom). A commentary named Ba’al ha-Purim was added to it, (punning on the title of Jacob ben Asher’s halakhic classic, Ba’al ha-Turim), was added to one copy of the second printing of the book (Venice, 1552).

Gersonides’s parody book tells the story of a fight between two mythological kings over Israel: Karmi (Vineyard), the righteous wine king, and Be’eri (Well), the evil water king. God sends the prophet Habakbuk (the bottle, a pun on the name of the biblical prophet Habakkuk) to help Karmi win and rule over Israel. The book ends with God drying up all the water from Be’eri’s land. Karmi wins and is crowned king of Israel. According to Sefer Habakbuk, this story—the fight between Karmi and Be’eri—is the real reason for celebrating Purim.

I recently found another parodic biblical text that survives in only one manuscript and should be dated to the fifteenth or the sixteenth centuries. It is titled Megillat Purim and describes a war between a wine king, Eshkol, and a water king, Afek. The story opens with the crowning of Eshkol by the prophet Haggai (hag – holiday in Hebrew). In a twist, Afek, the wicked water king, has a prophet of his own: Laban, the false prophet. At the end of the story, Eshkol defeats Afek and sings a song of praise to God based on the Song of the Sea.

The great philosopher-astronomer-parodist Gersonides wrote another parody, Megillat Setarim (Esoteric Scroll). Unlike Sefer Habakbuk, this is a parody of the talmudic discussions of Purim. Here, the rabbis discuss the importance of eating and drinking during Purim.

A later parody, the fourteenth century book of Haskamot (legal regulations) elaborates on the roles of the ceremonial Purim king. The custom of selecting a special king for the celebration of Purim is similar to the European customs of having a King of Fools or Lord of Misrule during Carnival celebrations.

What are we to make of these parodies? Were they inspired by European Parodia Sacra—parodies of sacred and canonical texts? Those parodies were also written in the language and style of canonical texts (mostly in Latin), while addressing “low” subjects such as drinking and gambling and they were also filled with puns, wordplay, and intentional misreadings of biblical passages. They were structured like religious masses but, instead of extolling God and His deeds, they exalted drinking, feasting, and gambling in the names of Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry, and Dolium (barrel). It can’t be happenstance that the name Bakbuk (or Habakbuk), the wine prophet in Gersonides’ parodies, sounds so much like Bacchus.
However, the Jewish parodies are still somewhat odd. They create a whole new ethos for the holiday, one that is completely opposite to the one created by the Megillah. If the Book of Esther was traditionally read as a description of powerless Jews in the diaspora, the new fictitious biblical stories deal almost solely with the fantasy of political power. Instead of Jews needing to find a way to save themselves under a ruler like Ahasuerus, we suddenly have stories about Jewish kings warring over the rule of Israel. This tension even leaves Ba’al ha-Purim, the parodic commentator on Sefer Habakbuk, struggling with the fact that the book does not refer to the story of Esther.
Nowadays, the dream of Jewish political power in the Land of Israel has finally come true. And with that in mind, we can read these parodies with a new sense of light and joy.