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Esther Was Named for the Myrtle, Sweet Outside and Bitter Within

The myrtle has sweet fragrance and bitter taste. The rabbis read Esther's double name as prophecy: sweetness for Mordecai, bitterness for Haman.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Plant That Explained the Child
  2. The Wound That Came With the Birth
  3. Sweet to Mordecai, Bitter to Haman
  4. The Name That Held the Whole Story

The Plant That Explained the Child

When the sages reached the verse where Mordecai fosters Hadassah, that is Esther, they stopped at the double name. Scripture gives her two names in the same breath, as though the second were a translation of the first. The rabbis did not treat this as accident or redundancy. They treated it as prophecy pressed into botany.

The myrtle, hadassah in Hebrew, has a characteristic that makes it unlike most fragrant plants. Its flowers produce sweet scent. Its leaves, when crushed, produce bitterness. The same branch holds both properties. You can bury your face in the blossoms and breathe something gentle, and then bruise a leaf between your fingers and taste something entirely different. The sages held this plant up against the woman and said: this is the shape of her life.

The Wound That Came With the Birth

Esther's parents were gone before she understood the word orphan. The tradition records the timing with deliberate specificity. Her father died before she was born. Her mother died in the act of giving birth. The rabbis press on this precision: Scripture could have simply said she had neither father nor mother and left the detail at that. Instead it places the losses at the exact moment when each parent was supposed to be most present, the father at conception, the mother at birth. The wounds arrived at the thresholds.

Mordecai took her in. He was her cousin, a generation older, already established in Shushan. The tradition records that he treated her as a daughter, a description the text uses with full weight. He did not house her at a distance. He raised her. And as she grew, the double nature the myrtle had named began to become visible.

Sweet to Mordecai, Bitter to Haman

The midrashic reading of the names is precise about the direction of each quality. Hadassah, the myrtle's sweetness, expressed itself toward Israel. Every act Esther performed inside the palace that protected her people, every meal she refused, every identity she concealed, every moment of prayer she embedded inside the Persian court's daily rhythm, carried that fragrance outward toward the ones who needed it. Mordecai waited at the palace gate and received reports from her through intermediaries, and what he received was consistent sweetness: cooperation, faithfulness, care.

The bitterness traveled the other direction. Haman would learn what Esther's name meant not through botany but through the collapse of everything he had built. The gallows he raised for Mordecai would take him. The decree he had sealed with the king's ring would be reversed by the same hand that had stamped it. His children would die. His house would fall to the man he had tried to hang. The bitter leaf of the myrtle was slow to arrive, but it arrived completely.

The Name That Held the Whole Story

Rabbi Berekhya, speaking in the name of Rabbi Levi, taught that the rose rises over thorns and briars: so Esther rose over Haman and his sons. The image adds a layer to the myrtle. The rose does not simply coexist with what is rough around it. It rises above it without being torn. Esther's rise through the Persian court, from orphan to queen to savior, was accomplished by a woman who moved through thorns without losing the bloom.

The two names together form a complete description: Hadassah for the sweetness that protected Israel, Esther for the hiddenness that protected her mission, the name derived from the Hebrew root for concealment, for what is veiled, for the star half-covered by cloud. She was sweet where sweetness served. She was hidden where hiding served. Both properties were always present, just as both are always present in the branch.

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From the tradition

Sources

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The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Esther Rabbah 6:5Esther Rabbah

The Megillah introduces the heroine with two names: "He fostered Hadassa, that is, Esther, his uncle's daughter, for she had neither father nor mother, and the girl was fair and beautiful; and with the death of her father and her mother Mordekhai took her for his own daughter" (Esther 2:7). The sages of Esther Rabbah read every word as deliberate. Why is she called Hadassa, the myrtle? Because the myrtle has a sweet fragrance yet a bitter taste, and Esther embodied both at once. To Mordekhai and to her people she was sweet, a source of fragrance and deliverance, while to Haman she proved bitter, the very instrument of his downfall. The single plant captures her double role in the story.

The rabbis then press on the phrase "for she had neither father nor mother." Rabbi Pinchas and Rabbi Chama bar Guryon, in the name of Rav, object to the obvious reading. Was Esther some foundling of unknown parentage, that Scripture must announce she had no father and no mother? Surely her lineage is plainly given. Why state the absence so starkly? They answer that the verse marks the cruelty of her orphaning down to its exact timing. When her mother conceived her, her father died, so that he never lived to see his daughter. And when she was born, her mother died in giving her life, so that she never knew the embrace of either parent. Esther entered the world having lost both, and from her very first breath she belonged to no one but Mordekhai, who raised her as his own. The double phrase teaches that she was an orphan in the fullest, most unsparing sense.

Full source
Legends of the Jews 12:56Legends of the Jews

More than just a label, sometimes a name is a window into a person's very soul. Take Esther, for example. Her story, as told in the Book of Esther, is one of bravery and salvation, but did you know the legends surrounding her birth are just as compelling?

The story begins with tragedy. Esther's mother died giving birth to her, leaving her an orphan not long after her father had passed away.

Mordecai, a righteous man, and his wife took in the orphaned Esther. His wife nursed her, and Mordecai himself, according to Legends of the Jews (Ginzberg), didn't hesitate to perform even the most traditionally "feminine" tasks to care for the child. What an image of selfless devotion!

About those names… Esther actually had two: Esther and Hadassah. Both names reflect her virtues. Hadassah, which means "myrtle," is particularly evocative. She was called Myrtle, we're told, because her good deeds spread her fame like the sweet fragrance of the myrtle that pervades the air.

The myrtle itself, according to tradition, is a symbol of the pious. Why? Because, like the evergreen myrtle, which remains vibrant in both summer and winter, the righteous ones never suffer dishonor, either in this world or the world to come. It's a beautiful metaphor, isn't it? A symbol of unwavering faith and enduring righteousness.

But there's more to the myrtle connection. The text goes on to say that Esther also resembled the myrtle in another way: despite its pleasant scent, the myrtle has a bitter taste. Esther, was pleasant to the Jews, but bitterness itself to Haman and all who belonged to him. She was a double-edged sword, a source of joy and salvation for her people, and a harbinger of doom for their enemies. This duality, this complexity, makes her story all the more fascinating.

So, what does Esther’s story and her names teach us? Perhaps it's that even in the face of immense loss and adversity, kindness and goodness can blossom. Or maybe it's that true strength lies not just in sweetness, but in the ability to be a force of justice, even when it's bitter.

Full source
Targum Sheni on Esther 2:7:1Targum Sheni on Esther

Esther is called Hadassah because she fills the world like myrtle fragrance.

Targum Sheni on (Esther 2:7) turns her names into prophecy. Hadassah means myrtle, and the righteous are compared to myrtle because their good works spread sweetness. The targum then reads Isaiah's promise that the fir and myrtle will rise in place of thorn and briar as a hidden map of the Purim story.

The thorn is Haman, who will rise in place of righteous Mordecai only to fall. The briar is Vashti, who will lose the throne so that Esther, the myrtle, can rise. The verse becomes a botanical prophecy of reversal.

That image changes Esther's introduction. She is not only an orphan raised by Mordecai, and not only the woman whose beauty brings her into the palace. She is the fragrant plant that appears where a harmful growth stood before. The Purim miracle begins quietly, as a myrtle growing in the shadow of thorns.

Full source
Esther Rabbah 6:7Esther Rabbah

Rabbi Berekhya, speaking in the name of Rabbi Levi, hears a hidden mercy buried inside the rawest cry of mourning. In the closing chapter of Lamentations, the survivors of the destroyed Temple wail: “We have become orphans, fatherless” (Lamentations 5:3). It is the lowest point of the book, a generation that feels abandoned, with no parent to shelter or protect it. The midrash refuses to let that despair be the final word.

According to Rabbi Levi, the Holy One blessed be He answers Israel measure for measure. You described yourselves as orphans, He says, so let Me draw your redeemer from that very condition. “By your lives,” God declares, the savior I will raise up for you in Media in time to come will likewise have neither mother nor father. The verse he points to is the description of Esther: “For she had neither father nor mother” (Esther 2:7), the very phrase that introduces the heroine of the Purim story, raised by her cousin Mordecai after her parents died.

The lesson is pointed. The same word that names Israel’s grief becomes the word that names its rescue. Esther, the orphaned girl in a foreign empire, is presented not as a coincidence but as a deliberate response to the nation’s tears. The God who heard the mourners of Jerusalem prepared, generations later, a deliverer shaped by the same loss, so that the people who once cried “fatherless” would be saved by one who shared their wound.

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