[Avodah] esther and virgins

[Zev Sero]

Eli Turkel wrote:
> My wife pointed out to me that in a latter posuk it says" Vaye'ehav
> hamelech es ester mikol hanoshim vatiso chein vochesed lefonov mikol
> habesulos" which implies that there was a broadening of the selection
> criteria at some point after the initial decree.>>

This is clearly stated in the gemara.


> This would mean that Achashverosh also "invited" married wives. Not a
> very good way of keeping friends in the kingdom!

Nor is conscripting every beautiful maiden in the kingdom!  Who would
allow his daughter to be seen in public when she was likely to be
kidnapped and taken to the palace, where the odds were enormous that
she would not be chosen, nor would she come home and marry someone
else, but would spend the rest of her life in the "beit hanashim sheni"?
That's why the gemara says he was a "melech tipesh", and contrasts his
behaviour to that of David Hamelech, who sent people out to find one
girl, and so everybody was eager that his daughter should be chosen.


> Doesn't seem to fit with the other stories of his making the party
> to make friends etc.

And yet it's clear *in the text* that this is how he treated "every
good-looking maiden" in the kingdom.  I think the Malbim explains
that this was his way of establishing that he had absolute power,
and could do whatever he liked, not for the public good but for his
own enjoyment.


> Remember he did not know that Esther was Jewish so this wouldnt
> have been an anti-Jewish act.

There's no hint of antisemitism.  Girls of every nation were taken.


> According to another Medrash that Esther was an old lady at the time
> it is even stranger.

This isn't a medrash, it's common sense.  Mordechai was her first
cousin (explicit in the pasuk), he was exiled in Galut Yechoniah,
11 years before the churban (again explicit in the pasuk), and he
was a member of the Sanhedrin-in-exile (not in the pasuk, but I
don't think anyone would dispute it).  Since semicha is only given
in EY, he had to be old enough at the time of Galut Yechoniah to
have merited and received semicha.  Let's make the unlikely
assumption that he was only 20; that would make him 31 at the
churban, and by this time he must have been in his 90s.  So how
young could his first cousin (and wife) have been?  Even if we
assume a 50-year gap, which seems a little implausible, that still
puts her in her 40s, and no longer in the supermodel category.
And the smaller the gap, and the older Mordechai was when he got
semicha, the older she was.

BTW, that she was his wife is definitely to be taken literally;
the gemara and *all* the rishonim and acharonim take it literally
and seriously, and learn halachot from it.  I think treating it
as some metaphoric medrash would come very close to the edge of
the acceptable range of hashkafa.


-- 
Zev Sero               Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's
zev at sero.name          interpretation of the Constitution.
                       	                          - Clarence Thomas