A big objection some people have against the historicity of Esther is that secular history doesn’t seem to mention this, though there may be some allusions to it.
Also, the idea of Haman’s proposal goes against how Persians
usually treated minorities in their empire. They generally had a policy of
tolerance unless you rebel. If you are willing to submit to their rule, they
generally let you keep your culture, religion etc. because this makes people
less likely to rebel. However, this does not mean that persecution of a
particular ethnic group by an individual official would have been impossible.
So the allegation is that there was by the time of the
Maccabees this festival of Purim, and Esther was a fairy tale made up to
explain it.
But the lack of clear secular corroboration is not proof
against Esther’s historicity. Ancient records are fragmentary, and Persian
royal inscriptions were normally propaganda, celebrating kings, building works,
victories, and divine favour—not palace scandal, an attempted empire-wide
massacre, or a king’s humiliating reversal of policy. Herodotus is the major
surviving Greek narrative source for Xerxes’ reign, but his interest was
chiefly in the Persian Wars and Greek interaction with Persia; he had no reason
to record every internal matter of the royal court. He mentions Amestris, a
prominent queen associated with Xerxes, and some have speculated that she could
be Esther. However, that identification is far from clear and is generally
considered unlikely.
However, the book of Esther, both in the Hebrew version and
in the extra parts found only in the Greek version, have intimate details of
Achaemenid Persian courtly life and practices that the average Jews of the
Maccabean period would not know. These include features such as the king’s
seven senior advisers, royal banquets, the organisation of the royal women’s
quarters and eunuchs, restrictions on access to the king, the golden sceptre,
royal seals, written decrees sent throughout the empire, scribal practices, and
other aspects of court protocol. Several of these features have parallels in
what is independently known about Achaemenid Persia from Greek sources, Persian
evidence, and archaeology. Someone in that Achaemenid Persian court would have
gotten those details right, while a normal Maccabean Jew would have had to
accessed historical records (which was not easy to get a hold of back then --
remember, things were in scrolls, in various scattered libraries of bigshots
you would need permissions to access, not easily accessed, not Google search 😅)
So while the form of Esther we have today in the Hebrew and
Greek are from the Maccabean period, the core story probably came from the
Persian period. And the text that Lysimachus son of Ptolemy translated into
Greek probably had those details because it’s unlikely for Lysimachus to have
known those details back in 77 BC, centuries after the fall of the Persian
empire. This is in spite of him getting the name of the king wrong - he wrote
Artaxerxes instead of Xerxes, probably because he confused the two names, being
similar in Hebrew.
So, while from the historical evidence alone, one cannot conclusively prove Esther to be historical, I think that, given the balance of probabilities, the evidence suggests that Esther is more likely to be historical than to be a myth made up by a Maccabean-era Jew to explain the festival of Purim.
