Ishtar & Marduk

The People Who Knew It Didn't Belong

The book of Esther has had a rocky relationship with the canon since the beginning. These are not fringe voices — these are the major figures of church history:

• The Dead Sea Scrolls community (about 150 BC – 70 AD) preserved fragments of every single book of the Hebrew Bible — every one — except Esther. The scholars who copied and preserved Scripture for Israel rejected it.
• Melito of Sardis (around 170 AD), the earliest known Christian list of Old Testament books, leaves Esther out entirely. His list is preserved by the historian Eusebius.
• Athanasius (367 AD), the bishop whose letter finalized the New Testament canon for much of the church, listed Esther outside the canonical books.
• Gregory of Nazianzus and Amphilochius of Iconium (4th century) both excluded Esther from their canonical lists.
• The rabbis themselves debated whether Esther belonged in the Hebrew Bible. The Talmud (Megillah 7a) preserves the argument.
• Martin Luther said it out loud: "I am so hostile to this book that I wish it did not exist, for it Judaizes too much and has much heathen perverseness." Even when he left it in his Bible, he doubted it belonged.

From the Essenes at Qumran to the Reformer in Wittenberg, serious students of Scripture have looked at the book of Esther and said, "This doesn't fit."

Mordecai = Marduk

Her cousin is no better. The name Mordecai comes from Marduk — literally meaning "devotee of Marduk" or "servant of Marduk." This is not a fringe theory. It is the agreed position of the Encyclopedia Judaica, Jewish scholar Jacob Hoschander, and virtually every serious reference work on the subject.

Who was Marduk?

• The chief god of Babylon. When Babylon rose to power under Hammurabi (around 1800 BC), Marduk was elevated to king of the Babylonian pantheon.
• The god of the Tower of Babel. The ziggurat of Babylon, called Etemenanki ("the house that is the foundation of heaven and earth"), was dedicated to Marduk. Many scholars identify it with the biblical Tower of Babel itself.
• Called "Bel" — "lord." The same name Yahuah condemned through Jeremiah:

The Hebrew word "Merodach" in that verse is Marduk. Yahuah declared that Marduk would be broken to pieces. And yet a hero in "biblical" Esther is named after him.

A Little History: When Was This Actually Written?

The book of Esther claims to be set in the reign of King Ahasuerus of Persia — usually identified with Xerxes I (486–465 BC). But scholars have long noticed that:

• The book contains historical impossibilities. If Mordecai was carried into exile with King Jeconiah in 597 BC (Esther 2:5–6) and is still actively serving in the palace under Xerxes, he would be over 120 years old.
• Persian records make no mention of a Jewish queen named Esther or a Jewish official named Mordecai. Xerxes' actual queen is documented: her name was Amestris, and she was Persian, not Jewish.
• The story of 75,000 Persians being slaughtered by Jews in a single empire-wide event (Esther 9:16) leaves no trace in Persian or Greek historical records. Events of that magnitude do not simply vanish from history.
• The book is almost universally dated by critical scholars to the 4th–3rd centuries BC (Hellenistic period) — more than 150 years after the events it claims to describe, and possibly even later.

The most honest scholarly position today is that the book of Esther is historical fiction — a story set in Persia, written by someone who knew some Persian customs, but not actual history. The story is designed to entertain and to give a backstory to the festival of Purim, which we'll cover separately.

Now compare this with what historians can document about the book's origin. The whole pattern — Mesopotamian setting, Mesopotamian names, Mesopotamian festival, no God of Israel — points to the book being produced by Jews still deeply embedded in Mesopotamian religious culture. Probably Jewish scribes working in Babylon centuries after the exile, who had absorbed enough of the surrounding religion that they could no longer tell the difference between Torah and Babylon.

Why This Matters

If you are a Christian, you may have grown up hearing sermons about "brave Queen Esther" standing up for her people. You may have heard the line "if I perish, I perish" quoted as an example of faith. You may have been told the book shows the "hidden hand of God."

Here is what this short study is asking you to consider. The book:

• Never names God. Not once.
• Names its heroine after a pagan goddess whom Yahuah condemned through His prophets.
• Names its hero after the chief god of Babylon — a god Yahuah said He would break to pieces.
• Was rejected or doubted by the Essenes, Melito, Athanasius, Luther, and the rabbis themselves.
• Was kept alive and forced into the canon by the Kabbalistic stream — the same stream that gave us the hexagram and the Zohar.

"Hidden hand of God" theology is one way to read this. The simpler reading is that there is no God in the book because the book was not about God. It was about Babylon — and specifically, about the gods Ishtar and Marduk winning. Jewish scribes in the post-exilic period rewrote a Babylonian myth with a Jewish coat of paint, and the church has been defending it ever since.

A companion blog on this website follows the symbol that the book carries — the star of Ishtar — from Persia to the Kabbalists to the flag that now flies over Jerusalem. If you have a few minutes, read that one next.