Vashti Was Throwing a Party Over the Ruins of the Temple

The Book of Esther opens with a banquet so lavish it feels comic. One hundred and eighty days of feasting. Gold couches. White and blue hangings. Drinks served in vessels that are each different from the last so no one has to share a cup. In the middle of the royal party, the queen Vashti holds her own banquet for the women in the king's house (Esther 1:9). It sounds, on the face of it, like an ordinary detail. The men have a feast. The women have a feast. Both feasts get drunk. The reader moves on.

One rabbi stopped reading. He looked at the verse, and then he looked at the date, and then he looked at the geography, and he saw something so ugly that he refused to let Esther Rabbah close its homily without naming it out loud.

The rabbi was Shmuel, one of the great Babylonian Amoraim of the third century, head of the academy at Nehardea and one of the two giants of the early Talmud. Shmuel was not a man inclined to gentle readings. He was an astronomer, a physician, a judge, and an expert in the calendar. He knew exactly when Persian parties were being thrown, and he knew exactly what else had been happening on those same days, and he was willing to say it.

Shmuel's reading is preserved in Esther Rabbah, a sixth-century Palestinian compilation of rabbinic homilies on the Book of Esther. He opened his teaching with a single verse from Jeremiah, and the verse is enough to stop the breath of any reader who has ever lit a Tisha b'Av candle. "When they are inflamed, I will set out their banquet, and get them drunk, that they revel and then sleep an endless sleep, never to awake, says the Lord" (Jeremiah 51:39). Jeremiah was speaking about Babylon. He was prophesying the fall of an empire that had built its glory on the ashes of another city's temple. The rabbis of Esther Rabbah heard the verse and realized that what Jeremiah had said about Babylon, he had also said about Persia.

Shmuel's teaching turns on a Hebrew pun that is almost invisible in translation. The verse says God will ashit their banquet, mishteihem, meaning something like "set out" or "prepare." Shmuel reads the same root and hears mishtoteihem, meaning foundations. God is not saying He will set out their banquet, Shmuel says. God is saying He will cut down their foundations. The word for party and the word for the ground under a building are one letter apart, and Shmuel refuses to let the coincidence pass.

The king's banquet is the foundation of the kingdom. The kingdom's foundation is about to be cut.

And then comes the second move, the one that turns this from a clever reading into a cold indictment. The Holy One blessed be He, Shmuel says, was looking at the map. The Temple in Jerusalem was in ruins. The altar was not burning. The priests were not serving. The whole architecture of the covenant was, in the literal sense of the word, rubble. And in Shushan, in the palace of the king, in the upper rooms where the women were gathered, Vashti was making drinking parties.

Shmuel says the timing was not an accident. The partying was on the back of the destruction. Some traditions, preserved elsewhere in Midrash Rabbah, make the point even sharper. Vashti, the granddaughter of Nebuchadnezzar and the daughter of Belshazzar, was throwing a feast on exactly the day her grandfather had burned the Temple. Not a day chosen at random. The anniversary. The same calendar square. She was celebrating the ruin.

This is the reading that reframes the entire Book of Esther. Shmuel is saying the story of Purim is not simply the story of a Jewish orphan who outmaneuvered an anti-Jewish advisor. It is the story of a woman who inherited the destruction of the Temple as a family triumph and tried to make that destruction permanent by feasting on its anniversary. When the midrash says "the Temple is in ruins and this wicked man is making drinking parties," the wicked man is Ahasuerus. But Vashti is not separate from him. Vashti is the drink in the cup. Vashti is the family history rising to the top of the empire.

The rabbis of Esther Rabbah were writing for a community that remembered the Temple. The Second Temple had been destroyed in 70 CE by Rome, and Esther Rabbah was compiled around the sixth century, when the memory was five hundred years old but still physically real in the imagination of every synagogue audience. Shmuel's teaching would have landed in that room like a thrown stone. The rabbis were saying that the pattern repeats. Every empire that celebrates the destruction of the Temple is putting its own foundation into the verse from Jeremiah. When they are inflamed, I will set out their banquet. The Hebrew is precise. The punishment is the party itself. The drink is the poison. The revelry is the floor cracking under their feet.

And then, Shmuel says, the rest of the Book of Esther is just the working out of the verse. Vashti is called to appear in front of the king in her royal crown (Esther 1:11). She refuses. Every commentary on Esther from the fifth century forward has tried to explain that refusal, and Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, published in seven volumes between 1909 and 1938, preserves several midrashic traditions about why. Some say she refused because she had a humiliating skin disease. Some say because Gabriel struck her with a tail. Some say because she had been ordered to appear wearing only her crown and she was too proud to walk naked into a men's banquet. The specifics differ. What unites every tradition is that the refusal became the pretext for her removal, and her removal became the opening for Esther.

Shmuel reads all of this through the frame of the verse from Jeremiah. The endless sleep Jeremiah prophesied was the sleep of Vashti, disappearing from history between chapters one and two of the book that bears another queen's name. She had danced on the Temple's grave, and the ground had opened under her own floor, and the midrash insists that the ground had been opening for several centuries already, and she had been too drunk to hear the cracking.

The rabbis did not gloat. They were reporting. They were saying that the foundation of the feast is the foundation of the kingdom, and both foundations were being cut at once, and the cutting was being done by the verse Shmuel had brought into the room.

The Book of Esther never mentions God. The rabbis of Esther Rabbah made sure He was the one reading the calendar.