[Avodah] Darshening the Megillah

[Micha Berger]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 09:39:04PM -0500, Lisa Liel wrote:
>> I think so, because Esther is the only book of Tanakh not found among
>> the Dead Sea Scrolls. Which would imply to me that it was the only book
>> of the canon not accepted by all Jews when their sect split off.

> I think it's more likely that the sectarians at Qumran rejected it  
> because it doesn't contain Hashem's name in it.  Assuming that they  
> maintained the norms of Klal Yisrael is a bit far-fetched, IMO.

The two pieces of my post were not separate. I was suggesting that since
Chazal's words could be taken as placing Esther among the last 3, it
seems to me that the Qumranim excluding it is because they split off
before Esther in particular was logical. More than logical, I took it
as self-evident and didn't realize I was presuming a conclusion.

I do think that it's hard to tell your people to drop something from
accepted canon. Especially when others were canonizing Esther with
apocryphal editions that did had Hashem's name.

(BTW, while looking up whether the Apocrypha did add Hashem's name,
I found out that the LXX has "boulaion", from which we get the English
"bully", for "Aggagi".)

But now I think this whole tangent is probably irrelevant anyway.

I was saying that one could take the Y-mi to mean either that Esther
in particular was given to be darshened, or that even Esther -- and
therefore certainly the earlier books -- were given.

However, as I already mentioned, R' Yuda besheim R' Laizer learns this
out from the same derashah from which we learn the requirement for the
megillah to have sirtut. Sirtut is specifically for the megillah. So
it would seem that despite my earlier attempt to see things two ways,
Rebbe and R' Elazer at least mean specifically Esther. It would require
understanding Rebbe as being choleiq with R' Chunah, rather than bringing
a prooftext to what was already said -- in order to support a second,
less obvious, read of the Y-mi.

And then whole question of whether Esther was last and therefore the
logical "even" doesn't really make a difference to my original topic.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha