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

She came into the world orphaned twice before she could speak. Her father died before her birth. Her mother died giving birth to her. She arrived into existence already defined by loss, a child who had never known either parent, handed immediately into the arms of cousins who had no obligation to take her in.

That Mordecai took her in is the first extraordinary fact of Esther's story. That he and his wife nursed her, cared for her, raised her as their own daughter, not as a ward or a dependent but as a child, is the second. Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's synthesis compiled between 1909 and 1938, records that Mordecai did not stand on any division of what men did and what women did. When the child needed care, he gave care. The tradition preserves this with something that reads like admiration: a righteous man who did not consider his own dignity when a baby required him.

Two Names for One Person

The child received two names, which is itself a window into how deeply the tradition thought about her. She was Hadassah, from the Hebrew word for myrtle. She was also Esther.

The legend of her birth lingers on the name Hadassah with a precision that rewards attention. The myrtle was chosen as her symbol for reasons that interlace. First, because the myrtle's fragrance spreads in all directions, not staying near the plant but traveling outward, and this was how the tradition understood her character: her good deeds did not stay contained within her own life but moved through the world, reaching people she would never meet.

Second, because the myrtle is evergreen, remaining bright and full in summer and winter alike, the sages drew an analogy to the genuinely righteous, who do not flourish only in good seasons. They remain. The Midrash Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, returns repeatedly to the myrtle as an image for those whose connection to life and faithfulness does not depend on circumstances going their way.

The Bitter Edge of Sweetness

But then the tradition adds a detail that complicates the warm image. The myrtle has a pleasant fragrance. It also has a bitter taste. The two qualities exist in the same plant simultaneously, and neither cancels the other.

This duality is precisely what the tradition means to identify in Esther. She was pleasant, genuinely and deeply, to the Jewish people. She was also bitterness itself to Haman and to all who shared his purposes. The tradition is careful not to present this as a contradiction, not to suggest that the bitterness tarnishes the sweetness or that the sweetness softens the necessity of the bitterness. They are both fully present. She carried both, the way the myrtle does.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the eighth-century midrashic work attributed to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, reads the Book of Esther as a story about Providence working through apparently ordinary human lives, through the fragrance of character built quietly over years. Esther's bitterness to Haman was not a departure from her nature. It was her nature, fully deployed.

What Orphanhood Made Possible

There is a way of reading Esther's orphanhood as pure loss, and the tradition does not minimize the grief of it. But Ginzberg's sources also note something else: the orphan who has no parents to hide behind, no family name to protect her, no inherited position to occupy, must become something from the inside out. She cannot inherit her righteousness. She has to build it.

Mordecai understood this. His devotion to her care was not charity. It was an understanding, perhaps clearer for his own experience of exile and loss, that the people formed by rupture sometimes carry something that the comfortable cannot. He raised her with attention and with teaching. He nursed her when she needed nursing. He guarded her when guarding was required.

A Name as a Life's Summary

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the seventh-century Aramaic translation and expansion of the Tanakh, treats the doubling of Esther's name as a structural feature of her destiny. Hadassah was the name she was born into. Esther was the name history gave her. Between those two names lives the whole arc of a life that began in grief and ended in deliverance.

The myrtle spreads its fragrance without trying. It does not announce its presence. It simply is what it is, and the scent moves on its own. The tradition's portrait of Esther is built around exactly this image: a woman whose goodness was not performed for an audience, not displayed in the court of the king, not dependent on recognition. It spread the way myrtle fragrance spreads, quietly and in all directions, reaching people long before they ever saw her face.

That is who the orphan became. That is what both her names remembered.