I. The Political Situation.  The position of the Jewish patriots was both perilous and tragic.  A ring of hostile peoples pressed them closely on every side.  The Jews were the victims of centuries of wrong and hatred.  Those residing in the neighboring lands also suffered from this widespread and bitter hostility.  Among all the peoples of southwestern Asia they had no allies except the Nabateans, an Arabian people that had driven the Edomites from their home on Mount Seir.  The only bond that bound them to this ambitious heathen race was the common hatred of the Syrians.  It was natural, therefore, that Judas a little later should send an embassy with the object of securing the moral support, if not the direct intervention, of the distant Roman power whose influence was beginning to be felt throughout all the Mediterranean coast lands.  For the present, however, Judas was dependent simply upon the sword for defence.  He also had no time for permanent conquest, for he must prepare himself for the heavier blow that the court of Antioch was preparing to deliver.  All that he could do, therefore, was to make sudden attacks upon his foes on every side and rescue the persecuted Jews by bringing them back with him to Judea.

II.  The Jewish Attitude toward the Heathen Reflected in the Book of Esther.  In these perilous circumstances it is not strange that the Jews gravitated far from the position of broad tolerance advocated by the ii Isaiah and the authors of the prophecy of Malachi and in the stories of Ruth and Jonah.  In the stress of conflict they completely lost sight of their mission as Jehovah’s witnesses to all the world.  The destruction of the heathen seemed to them absolutely necessary if Jehovah’s justice was to be vindicated.  The spirit of this warlike, blood-thirsty age is most clearly formulated in the book of Esther.  The presence of Aramaic and Persian words testify to its late date.  It is closely allied to the midrashim or didactic stories that were a characteristic literary product of later Judaism.  Like the stories of Daniel, the book of Esther contains many historical inconsistencies.  For example, Mordecai, carried as a captive to Babylon in 597 B.C., is made Xerxes’s prime-minister in 474 B.C.  Its pictures of Persian customs are also characteristic of popular tradition rather than of contemporary history.  Its basis is apparently an old Babylonian tradition of a great victory of the Babylonians over their ancient foes, the Elamites.  Mordecai is a modification of the name of the Babylonian god Marduk.  Estra, which appears in the Hebrew Esther, was the late Babylonian form of the name of the Semitic goddess Ishtar.  Vashti and Hamman, the biblical Haman, were names of Elamite deities.  Like the story of creation, this tale has been Hebraized and adapted to the story-teller’s purpose.  His aim is evidently to trace the origin of the late Jewish feast of Purim.  It is probable that this feast was an adaptation of the Babylonian New-Year’s feast which commemorated the ancient victory.  The story in its present form is strongly Jewish.  It exalts loyalty to the race, but its morality is far removed from that of Amos and Isaiah.  Its exultation over the slaughter of thousands of the heathen is displeasing even in a romance, although it can easily be understood in the light of the Maccabean age in which it was written.