Towards a Hermeneutics of Ambiguity: The Book of Esther and the Silence of Signs

Abstract

The “accidental” does not seem to have any place in modern literary theory. In narrative, everything is meant to have a function and therefore signify. Indeed, contingency, fortuitous coincidences, belongs rather to the domain of hermeneutics and interpretive projections. The Book of Esther confronts us with such a kind of “causality” which is both plausible and “unexpected.” It tells the story of an extermination plot in Ahasuerus’ court, which is finally undone via an “astonishingly” favorable series of circumstances. Still, the text remains silent about the presumed logic of these coincidences. It simply points out a concomitancy of events, without indicating any superior intelligibility. More generally speaking, both Midrash and Talmud insist on these textual “signs” being opaque and deceiving — as if the rabbis wished to raise the (literary) devices of ambiguity to an ontological level, and open with the Book of Esther an enigmatic, essentially ambivalent, hermeneutics of destiny.

Melodrama and the ‘art of government’: Jewish Emancipation and Elizabeth Polack’s Esther, the Royal Jewess; or The Death of Haman!

“…Its plot is more plausible than the biblical Esther story, which is characterised by convolution and what Betty Rojtman and Jonathan Stavsky call an 'astonishingly favorable series of circumstances'. 36 The string of unlikely coincidences -so implausible as to warrant divine explanation for many -take on supernatural form in Polack's play so that the king's sleeplessness is figured as the visitation of Time itself to the king's bedside. For Benjamin, such supernatural elements confirm, not undermine, historicity because 'prophetic dreams', 'an almost obligatory ingredient of the drama', 'belonged to the domain of fate' (p. 134), or subjection to forces beyond human control.…”