Secrets and Lies: Secrecy Notices (Esther 2:10, 20) and Diasporic Identity in the Book of Esther

Abstract

In the Hebrew and Greek canonical versions of her book, Esther, the beauti ful Jewish orphan, is taken with all the beautiful young virgins into the Persian king's harem. Mordecai, her cousin and foster father, has commanded Esther not to reveal her people and her kin, and the text assures us twice that she did not (MT/LXX 2:10,20). Of all those taken into the harem, Esther wins the favor of the king—and only in the final scenes of the book does she reveal to him her relation ship to Mordecai and that she is a Jew. But there is another version of the story. Like the book of Tobit, the book of Esther is preserved in two different Greek versions: the widely attested LXX and a lesser-known, second Greek text, now commonly called the Alpha-Text (AT), which is attested in four medieval manuscripts.1 While similar in its main lines to the LXX and the MT, the AT does not say that Esther kept her identity secret; few scholars have observed that in the AT at least the king, if not the rest of the court, knows that she is a Jew. This difference has further implications for the AT s ren dering of the crucial episode in ch. 4, in which Mordecai tells Esther of the edict against the Jews and implores her to intervene. In this article, I consider (1) the significance of Esther's secret for under standing diasporic identity in each of the three versions.21 further consider (2) the

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