ESTATE

the Temple as a place made unclean by the heathenism of the priests. This bias was strengthened through the assumption oJ the liigh priesthood by the Hasmonaean house, an event wliich still further discounted the sacramental value of the Temple services. So these men, knit into closely coherent groups, mainly in Judsea,

ESTHER, BOOK OF

obtained by Haman, to the effect that all those of Jewish nationality in the king's dominions were to be put to death. Esther's action brought about an entire re-versal of the decree. Haman was put to death, and Mordecai was honoured by the king, while Esther's .position was still further strengthened; the Jews were

found the satisfactions of life in deepening fellowship, Spermitted to take revenge on those who had sought

and an ever more intense devotion to the ideal of Levitical perfection. In course of time, as the logic of lite carried them forward into positions of which they had not at first dreamed, the groups became more and more closely knit, and at the same time more fundamentally sepa^ ratistic regarding the common life of the Jews. So we find, possibly late in the 1st cent. B.C., the main group of Essenes colonizing near the Dead Sea, and.constituting a true monastic order.

The stricter Essenes abjured private property and marriage in order to secure entire attention to the Torah. The Levitical laws of holiness were observed with great zeal. An Essene of the higher class became unclean if a fellow-Essene of lower degree so much as touched his garment. They held the name of Moses next in honour to the name of God. And their Sabba-tarianism went to such lengths that the bowels must not perform their wonted functions on the Seventh Day.

At the same time, there are reasons for thinking that foreign influences had a hand in their constitution. They worshipped towards the sun, not towards the Temple. This may have been due to the influence of Parsism. Their doctrine of immortality was Hellenic, not Pharisaic. Foreign influences in this period are quite possible, for it was not until the wars with Kome imposed on Judaism a hard-and-fast form that the doors were locked and bolted. Yet, when all is said, the foreign influence gave nothing more than small change to Essenism. Its innermost nature and its deepest motive were thoroughly Jewish.

It is probable that John the Baptist was affected by Essenism. It is possible that our Lord and the Apostolic Church may have been influenced to a certain extent. But influence of a primary sort is out of the question. The impassioned yet sane moral enthusiasm of early Christianity was too strong in its own kind to be deeply touched by a spirit so unlike its own.

Henry S. Nash.

ESTATE. — 'State' and 'estate' occur in AV almost an equal number of times, and with the same meaning. Ct. Col 4' 'All my state shall Tychicus declare unto you,' with the next verse, 'that he might know your estate.' In Ac 22' ' all the estate of the elders' (Gr."' all the presbytery') means all the members of the San-hedrin. The pi. occurs in the Pref. to AV, and in Ezk 36" 'I will settle you after your old estates,' i.e. according to your former position in life. The heading of Ps 37 is ' David persuadeth to patience and confidence in God, by the different estate of the godly and the wicked.' ..

ESTHER ('star'). — The Jewish name, of which this is the Persian (or Babylonian) form, is Hadassah (cf. Est 2'), which means 'myrtle.' She was the daughter of Abihail, of the tribe of Benjamin, and was brought up, an orphan, in the house of her cousin Mordecai, in Shushan. Owing to her beauty she became an inmate of the king's palace, and on Vashti the queen being disgraced, Esther was chosen by Xerxes, the Persian king, to succeed her. The combined wisdom of Mordecai and courage of Esther became the means of doing a great service to the very large number of Jews living under Persian rule; for, owing to the craft and hatred of Haman, the chief court favourite, the Jews were in danger of being massacred en Uoc; but Esther, insti-gated by Mordecai, revealed her Jewish nationality to the king, who realized thereby that she was in danger of losing her life, owing to the royal decree,

their destruction. Mordecai and Esther put forth two decrees: first, that the 14th and 15th days of the month Adar were to be kept annually as ' days of feasting and gladness, and of sending portions one to another, and gifts to the poor' (Est 9^); and, second, that a day of mourning and fasting should be observed in memory of the sorrow which the king's first decree had occasioned to the Jewish people (Q^'-s', cf. 4'-').

The attempt to identify Esther with Amestris, who, according to Herodotus, was one of the wives of Xerxes, has been made more than once in the past; but it is now universally recognized that this identification will not bear examination. All that is known of Amestris — her heathen practices, and the fact that her father, a Persian general named Otanes, is specifically mentioned by Herodotus — proves that she cannot possibly have been a Jewess; besides which, the two names are fundamentally distinct. As to whether Esther was really a historical personage, see the next article.

ESTHER, BOOK OF.— 1. Place in the Canon.— 'The Book of Esther belongs to the second group of the third division of the Hebrew Canon— the Kethubim, or ' Writings ' — a group which comprises the Megilloth, or ' Rolls,' of which there are five, — Song of Songs, Ruth, Lam., Eccles., Esther. It was not without much dis-cussion that Esther was admitted into the Canon, for its right to be there was disputed both by the Jewish authorities and by the early Christian Church. As late as the 2nd cent. a.d. the greatest Jewish teacher of his day. Rabbi Jehudah, said, 'The Book of Esther defileth not the hands' [the expression 'to defile the hands' is the technical Jewish way of saying that a book is canonical; it means that the holiness of the sacred object referred to produces by contact with it a state of Levitical Impurity]. In some of the earlier lists of the BibUcal books in the Christian Church that of Esther is omitted; Athanasius (d. 373) regarded it as uncanonlcal, so too Gregory Nazianzen (d. 391); Jacob of Edessa (c.700) reckons it among the apocryphal books. It is clear that Esther was not universally accepted as a book of the Bible until a late date.

2. Date and authorship .^ — The language of Esther points unmistakably to a late date; it shows signs, among other things, of an attempt to assimilate itself to classical Hebrew; the artificiality herein betrayed stamps the writer as one who was more familiar with Aramaic than with Hebrew. Further, the Persian empire is spoken of as belonging to a period of history long since past (cf. 'in those days,' 1^); the words, 'There is a certain people scattered abroad and dis-persed among the peoples in all the provinces of thy kingdom' (3'), show that the 'Dispersion' had already for long been an accomplished fact. Moreover, the spirit of the book points to the time when great bitterness and hatred had been engendered between Jew and Gentile. The probability, therefore, is that Esther

. belongs to the earlier half of the 2nd cent. B.C. Of its authorship we know nothing further than that the writer was a Jew who must have been in some way connected with Persia; the book shows him to have been one whose racial prejudice was much stronger ihan his religious fervour; it is extraordinary that a book of the Bible should never once mention the sacred name of God; the secular spirit which is so character-istic of the book must have been the main reason of the disinclination to incorporate it into the Scriptures, which has been already referred to.

3. Contents. — The book purports to give the history

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