Is the Book of Esther a mixture of fact and fiction designed to offer hope and instruction to defeated people?

Answer 1

According to tradition, the book of Esther is completely historical.

The book was written in the mid-4th century BCE, and was made part of the Hebrew Bible canon which was sealed a couple of decades after.

The grave of Mordecai and Esther still stands in Hamadan; and the Jews of Iran, to this day, are referred to as "the children of Esther."

Esther was queen for about 11 years.
The name of Mordecai is the Judaised pronunciation of Marduka, which is attested in the Persepolis Texts as the name of officials in the Persian court during the period of Xerxes I. One of these officials was the biblical Mordecai.

For the name of Esther, a number of etymologies are possible.
1) Esther comes from the Persian "setareh," meaning "star".
2) Esther comes from the Aramaic "istahar," meaning "moon." Beautiful as the moon (Talmud, Megillah 13a).
3) Esther comes from the Semitic root ath-tar, "morning star." There is support for this too in the Talmud (Yoma 29a).

4) Esther comes from the Median "astra," meaning "myrtle." The book of Esther (2:7) states that she had both names, Esther and Myrtle (Hadassah in Hebrew).

Esther was the heroine and central figure in the Biblical book of Esther. She was crowned about 55 years after the destruction of the First Temple, and fifteen years before the Second Temple was built. The Jews were in the Babylonian exile. A few of them, such as Nehemiah, Mordecai and Daniel, rose to positions of prominence under the Babylonian kings.
The last of the Prophets of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) were still living.
King Cyrus had recently made his famous proclamation (2 Chronicles 36:22-23) allowing the Jews to resettle Judea (Israel), and some had gone up with Zerubavel, but the enemies of the Jews had then slandered them (Ezra ch.4), causing the Babylonian king to put a stop to the rebuilding and resettlement of Judea. This last event was around the same time that Esther became Queen.

When she became orphaned, she was adopted by her cousin Mordecai.

Later, when Queen Vashti refused to appear before Ahasuerus (in Esther ch.1), Memuchan, a Persian royal adviser, advised King Ahasuerus (Xerxes I) to remove Vashti from being Queen of Persia, and King Ahasuerus agreed to his advice.

In Esther Chapter 2, royal eunuchs advised Ahasuerus to look for a new queen. Esther was the best-looking woman, and Ahasuerus picked her to replace Vashti as Queen.

Esther and her cousin Mordecai (who had once saved the king's life) later persuaded the king to cancel an order for the extermination of the Jews in his vast realm, which had been plotted by the king's chief minister, Haman. Instead, Haman was hanged on the gallows he had built for Mordecai, and the Jews were given permission to destroy their enemies. The Jewish festival of Purim celebrates this event.

See also:

More about the Hebrew Bible

Debunking the Bible-critics

Jewish history timeline

Answer 2

The Book of Esther contains very little accurate history. For example, the book tells us that Esther married the Persian King Xerxes (Ahasuerus) and succeeded the former queen, Vashti, but from a historical point of view, the two queens, Vashti and Esther, are both indisputably fictional. Leonard J Greenspoon, in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, 'Between Alexandria and Antioch: Jews and Judaism in the Hellenistic Period', says there was no known Jewish queen in Persia. The extensive records from the Persian Empire do not mention Mordecai or the bloodshed that took place, although Esther 10:2 says all this was written in the chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia. The only King Xerxes who ruled Persia for more than three years is Xerxes I, who reigned for a period of twenty one years, from 486 to 465 BCE (Xerxes II ruled for less than one year). Bruce Feiler says in Where God was Born that Queen Amestris was Xerxes' only known wife, and that she remained queen long after the third year of his reign. Feiler also points out that Mordecai is identified as having been sent into exile by Nebuchadnezzar, an event that must have occurred over a century before Xerxes assumed power. Some Jewish rabbis have sought to overcome this last difficulty by rewriting Persian history to place the reign of Xerxes within a human lifetime of the Babylonian conquest.Modern scholars say the Book of Esther was written in the second century BCE as a Jewish novel, more for entertainment than to provide hope for a defeated people. For more information on the Book of Esther, please visit: http://christianity.answers.com/bible/the-book-of-esther-explained