Is Esther Historical?

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.