Abstract
Recent studies have relied on Esther 2.5–6 to establish the story as fiction or as farce, a way of reading the text that was also the case in ancient and medieval interpretations. This article proposes that that reading strategy ignores the syntactic ambiguity in these verses, an ambiguity that allows for an alternate reading in line with both Hebrew grammar and historical plausibility. As a result, it is argued that a reading which was acceptable to the pre-modern interpreters, without access to historical data regarding the Persian Empire, ought to be rejected today in light of current knowledge.
1. Introduction
The introduction of Mordecai in Esther 2.5–6 is often held up as proof that the story is non-historical. The text reads:
There was a Jewish person in Susa the Fortress; his name was Mordecai, son of Yair, son of Shimei, son of Kish, a Benjaminite, who was exiled from Jerusalem with the exilic community which was exiled, together with Jehoiachin, king of Judah, which Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, exiled.
In the present study questions of historical syntax 1 and semantics 2 will be set aside, and only a single issue will be dealt with: Does this passage claim that Mordecai was exiled from Jerusalem with Jehoiachin? Numerous recent writers have assumed this to be the case. Timothy Liniak, for example, states: ‘Mordecai is one of the noble Jews exiled from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar (v. 6)’. 3 From this it is deduced that the book is fiction. The argument goes that if Mordecai were exiled with Jehoiachin in 597, even as an infant, he would be around 112 years old by the time Xerxes came to the throne in 485. It is not possible, therefore, that later in the book he would play the role he is said to have played in the twelfth year of Xerxes (when he would be 124), or that he would have a young beautiful (virginal) cousin. Two representative examples from recent writers (which could easily be multiplied) will suffice:
The author was not composing a work of history and made no pretense of it. He signals his playfulness right at the beginning… In the event that anyone missed those signals, the author makes a point of identifying Mordecai as a victim of the Babylonian Captivity, which took place a century before the time of Xerxes. Mordecai would therefore be a centenarian, not the most likely candidate for the demanding job of vizier, and his cousin would hardly be a contender in the Miss Persia contest… One might best characterize [Esther] as a comic historical novel. 4
In fact, the inner chronology of the book indicates quite clearly that we are dealing with fiction. According to Esther 2:5-6, Mordecai was exiled to Babylon in 597
These confident statements seem unaware of the syntactic ambiguity of Est. 2.5–6, namely, who is the head of the relative clause הלגהדשאםלשודיט, Mordecai or Kish? Not all modern scholars ignore this question. Adele Berlin and Jon Levenson, for example, mention the view of the ‘traditional Jewish exegetes’ that Kish may be the antecedent of דשאהלגה. Both reject this view, however; Berlin explains that it ‘diminishes the connection between the Kish mentioned here and Kish, the father of Saul’. 6 (On this point, see below.)
The purpose of the present study is two-fold. First, a brief history of interpretation will be presented. It will be seen that the common view in antiquity was that it was indeed Mordecai who was exiled from Jerusalem, and the exegetical and historical underpinnings of this view will be analyzed. In the Middle Ages an ambiguity in this verse was discussed by numerous commentators, but it was a different ambiguity than the one discussed above. Second, it will be argued that the understanding that it was Kish who was exiled, and not Mordecai, is philologically impeccable and historically preferable, and that it is the correct reading of the verse.
2. The Ancient Interpretations
It should be prefaced that there are two distinct, if related, questions here: (1) Is Kish the great-grandfather or Mordecai, or is he the Kish known from the book of Samuel to have been Saul's father, and thus a distant ancestor of Mordecai from centuries ago? (2) Was it Mordecai or Kish who was exiled from Jerusalem? Clearly, if Kish is the father of Saul, he could not be the head of the relative clause הלגהדשא; he could not have been exiled by the Babylonians, and so Mordecai must have been. If the genealogy is taken more literally, it is conceivable that either Mordecai or his great-grandfather was the one exiled with Jehoiachin.
These possibilities can be summarized as follows:
1. Kish is the great-grandfather of Mordecai →
(1a) Kish was exiled from Jerusalem in 597.
(1b) Mordecai was exiled from Jerusalem in 597.
2. Kish is the father of Saul →
Mordecai was exiled from Jerusalem in 597.
If, therefore, we find texts that identify the Kish named in Est. 2.5 with the father of Saul, we can be sure that they also understood ‘Mordecai’ to be the head of the relative clause—in other words, understood that Mordecai was the one exiled from Jerusalem.
The Greek versions of Esther make it clear that it was Mordecai who was exiled, in two ways. First, the relative clause in 2.6 is in the nominative (őς ην αíχμάλωτoς ∊ζ _∊ρoνσαλνμ). 7 Second, in the Greek Addition A, which precedes the story told in the MT in both the Old Greek and the Alpha Text versions of Esther, Mordecai is introduced at the very beginning: ‘Mordecai, the son of Yair, son of Simei, son of Kish, from the tribe of Benjamin, saw a dream. He was a Judean man serving in the city of Susa, a great man, serving in the court of the king. He was one of the group of exiles whom Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, took captive from Jerusalem…’ 8
Classical rabbinic exegesis also took Kish to be the distant ancestor of Mordecai and father of King Saul. This is indicated in numerous ways. The Targum Rishon, for example, has, דכ דיאי דבבטיכ… יבדדט ידקתט היט שוש יק ךבא דג דביעטש, ‘he was called Mordecai…son of Yair son of Shimei
this was the Shimei who belittled David and whom Joab wanted to kill but [David] did not allow him—because he saw with the divine spirit that the redeemers Mordecai and Esther were destined to descend from him. But when Shimei ceased procreating, David ordered his son Solomon to kill him. 10
Later on in this Targum, Esther provides a fuller genealogy for her ‘uncle’, which contradicts the first one in the details, and goes well beyond it in scope:
Mordecai the righteous, brother of my father, son of Hefer, son of Shimei, so of Shemida’, son of Ba'anah, son of Elah, son of Micah, son of Mefiboshet, son of Jonathan, son of King Saul, son of Kish, son of Abiel, son of Zeror, son of Bekhorat, son of Afiyaḥ, son of Sheharim, son of Uzziah, son of Sason, son of Michael, son of Eliab, son of Ammiqur, son of Sefatyah, son of Petuel, son of Potah, son of Melokh, son of Jerubaal, son of Yeruham, son of Hananiah, son of Zabdi, son of Elpa'al, son of Shimri, son of Zebadyah, son of Remuth, son of Hashom, son of Shehorah, son of Uzza, son of Guzza, son of Gera, son of Benjamin, son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham. 11
In this latter genealogy, the Shimei mentioned is not the Shimei known from the book of Samuel, who degraded David on his way out of Jerusalem. 12 But the Kish mentioned is the father of Saul, and on this reading, in fact, Mordecai and Esther are descended directly through Saul, not just through his father's family. 13
A midrash found in two collections 14 tells that the reason Mordecai is identified as a ‘Judean’—this is, how the midrash understands the reference to him as a yehudi in 2.5—is to reward David, who was from the tribe of Judah. David showed forbearance with Shimei when the latter belittled him, because he knew with the help of divine inspiration that Shimei would have a descendant who would save the Jews—that is, Mordecai. God rewarded David by promising to identify Mordecai as a member of David's tribe.
In sum, many rabbinic texts take for granted position (2) mentioned above: the Kish named in Est. 2.5 is identified with Kish, the father of Saul, from the book of Samuel. These traditions can therefore be assumed to reflect the understanding that it was Mordecai who was exiled from Jerusalem, although this is not explicitly developed in the extant texts. Interestingly, the details of the familial relationship linking Mordecai and Esther with Saul differs in the texts just seen. This suggests that the tradition of connecting the two Kishes was widespread, but the task of working out the details was left to the individual midrashists. Thus one is reminded of the conclusion of Bialik Lerner with regard to the midrashim on Esther in particular:
It is apparent that aside from the regular task of explaining the Scroll of Esther, …numerous stock topics, herein referred to as ‘topoi’, have come to be accepted as standard literary devices of the Esther Midrashim. One may thus postulate that groups of students and laymen feverishly anticipated the public and the private Purim lectures of the rabbis and the homilists wherein they presented their novel approach and presentation of the various topoi. As a result, each author, redactor, preacher, or compiler made extensive efforts to include these tactical literary embellishments in his oral and written endeavours. 15
3. The Medieval Discussion
The medieval commentators, Rabbanites and Karaites, adopt the view that Mordecai himself had been exiled from Jerusalem. Their understanding of the chronology of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Empires was incomplete, so although they knew that Mordecai would have to have been elderly in the story of Esther, the magnitude of that problem was far reduced for them. For example, the Karaite Yefet b. ‘Eli writes:
The mudawwin indicates that (Mordecai) was living at that time in Susa the fortress, though he was not born there… He also indicates that his stock was from Jerusalem, and that he had been exiled among the rest of the exile of Jehoicahin, which represented the most distinguished of the exiles—they who are called ‘good figs’ (Jeremiah 24). At this time, however, he was an old man, for he had been exiled at a time elapsed seven years from the reign of Babylon, then continuing on sixty-three years for the reign of Babylon, and then, for the reign of the Magians, a year for Darius, three years for Cyrus, and seven years for the reign of Xerxes, the total of which is seventy-four years—though we do not know how old Mordecai was at the time of his exile. 16
Rashi states simply that Mordecai was called a yehudi ‘because he was exiled with the Judean exile’. 17 Similarly, the commentary of the French Sages (which often—but not in this case—cites Rashbam or R. Joseph Qara as its source) explicitly follows the Talmudic tradition that ‘Mordecai was among those exiled’ in 597. 18
Regarding the genealogical question, however, there was more debate among the medievals. An anonymous Karaite commentary from the school of Abū Ya'aqūb Yūsuf ibn Nūḥ, for example, puts the options this way:
It is possible that Yair was his father, Shimei his grandfather, and Kish his great-grandfather; it is also possible that Kish is the progenitor of Saul, and Shimei the son of Kish and the relative of Saul and Yair the son of Shimei, without interruption. 19
In Ibn Ezra's first version of his commentary, he, too, suffices with the ambiguity:
if [the Kish mentioned] were the father of Saul [and Mordecai was in fact descended through Saul], it would have mentioned Saul—for he was a king!—and not his father. Therefore, it is not known if Mordecai was a descendant of Saul or not. 20
All that is known from this genealogy, claims Ibn Ezra, is that Mordecai and Saul come from the same tribe, Benjamin.
In the second version of his commentary, however, Ibn Ezra goes farther and argues that the Kish of our verse is certainly not Saul's father, but rather Mordecai's great-grandfather:
Kish—this is the name of [Mordecai's] father's [father's] father, and not Kish the father of Saul, in my opinion, for why would [the author] skip generations? And furthermore, it would have been more appropriate to associate him genealogically with the anointed one of God (= Saul himself, rather than his father), for he is more important than his father. 21
Surprisingly, neither Ibn Ezra nor anyone else concludes from this argument that it was Kish who was exiled; the view that it was Mordecai who was exiled is, as far as I can tell, unanimous among the medievals. 22
Thus we can summarize the interpretive possibilities in the following table:
4. Philological Discussion
Given the interpretive options, modern scholars, who—unlike the ancient or medieval commentators—know the history of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Empires, may have been expected to realize quickly that option (1b) was historically impossible, but that (1a) was possible and should be embraced. In other words, the problematic notion that Mordecai was exiled along with Jehoiachin in 597 should have been quickly discarded, since, historically speaking, it is most natural to take Kish to be the one who was exiled. And indeed, some nineteenth-century commentaries on Esther took the view that Kish was in exile in 597, but even then, more rejected it. For instance, C.F. Keil cited the view that Kish was the head of the relative clause, and then wrote:
We grant the possibility of this view; nevertheless it is more in keeping with the Hebrew narrative style to refer דשא to the chief person of the sentence preceding it, viz., Mordochai, who also continues to be spoken of in ver. 7. 23
The claim that relative clauses in Hebrew should refer to the ‘chief person’ of the sentence is a common one in the commentaries on this verse, but it is demonstrably false. There are many examples of passages where a character is identified together with a patronymic or matronymic, which is followed by a relative clause, and the relative clause refers to the named parent, not the character originally introduced. Examples from elsewhere in the Bible, are easy to find:
2 Samuel 4.8:
here is the head of Ish-boshet, son of Saul, your enemy, who sought your life.
Genesis 24.15:
Look, Rebekkah was coming out—who was born to Betuel, son of Milkah, wife of Nahor, brother of Abraham—and her jug was on her shoulder.
There is even a clear example later on in Esther 2:15:
Esther b. Avihayil the uncle of Mordecai, whom he adopted as a daughter. 24
The ambiguity is simply one of the scope of the relative clause. In the passages just mentioned, the structure may be said to be [X b.][Y rel], whereas in other passages, where the relative clause does refer to the first character named in the text, the structure may be said to be [X b. Y][rel]. Or, to put it differently, the phrase תא שקב דשא ךביא לואש ןב תשב שיא ךש־בנ has to be bracketed as תא שקב דשא ךביא לואש] [ןב תשב שיא] [ךש־נ; thus the relative clause refers to ‘Saul’. The alternative bracketing would be [ךש־ב תא שקב דשא] [ךביא לואש ןב תשב שיא]∗, in which case the relative clause would refer to Ish-boshet.
Beside the faulty grammatical argument, there seem to have been further considerations which have led to modern scholars retaining the idea that Mordecai was born in Jerusalem. The comment of Paton is instructive in this regard:
According to [many nineteenth-century] commentators, the relative pronoun who refers, not to Mordecai, but to his great-grandfather Kish. Against this view are the facts that, as just remarked, Kish is probably not an immediate ancestor, but is the father of King Saul; and that Heb. usage demands the reference of who to Mordecai. The appositives ben Jair, ben Shimei, ben Kish, like Johnson or Jackson, serve merely as surnames to Mordecai. 25
Paton's second point is a claim about ‘Hebrew usage’. This can quickly be disposed of, since we have already seen that it is not true that ‘Hebrew usage demands the reference of who to Mordecai’. The first argument offered by Paton, though, is that Kish is Saul's father, and therefore cannot have been exiled in the sixth century
It is true, however, that it is exegetically difficult to abandon the connection to Saul so explicitly indicated if Kish is Saul's father. Much has rightly been made about Mordecai and Haman being the heirs to the old war between Saul and Agag, king of the Amalekites. 26 The conclusion that this Kish is not that Kish does not imply severing the connection, however. Levenson writes that Mordecai's genealogy is ‘more… reminiscent of the introduction of Saul in 1 Sam. 9:1…than coincidence allows’, but concludes that ‘we should not assume that Mordecai is a descendant of Saul, only that the two are to be thought of together’. 27 This is precisely correct: the purpose of mentioning the names of Mordecai's grandfather and great-grandfather, Shimei and Kish, was not merely biographical. Instead, the names are supposed to remind the reader of the other characters with these names, characters from long ago, aligned with Saul and opposed to David. 28
5. Conclusions
It is a strange phenomenon that modern scholars, who know full well that on historical grounds it is impossible that Mordecai was exiled, have preferred to read the text to say just that. The medievals, who did not know the historical problems this reading creates, rejected it on other grounds. Yefet was bothered by the age of Mordecai when he realized he would have had to have been no less than 74, but that age, although surprising enough to merit notice, was still within the realm of reason. The comments of Amos Hakham in his commentary on Esther appear to me to be precisely on target: ‘Some of the ancient interpreters explained that Mordecai himself was exiled. According to the modern understanding of the chronology, however, the beginning of Xerxes’ reign was more than 110 years after Jehoiachin was exiled, and one should therefore explain that it was Kish who was exiled’. 29
This brings us to the overarching consideration which seems to have led modern scholars to adopt the reading of Mordecai as the centenarian exile, and this also brings us back to the beginning of our discussion: scholars searching for the farcical in the book have found it here. This is not a compelling argument, however, since it purports to prove that the book is a farce by privileging a farcical reading of the text, despite the existence of viable alternatives. There certainly are satirical elements in the book of Esther, especially in the first chapter. 30 But overall, it seems that the author meant to write a plausible, if not factual, narrative. The claim defended here, that the text, when read correctly, is emphatically not farcical, but is in fact perfectly plausible, should not be construed as an argument for the historicity of the book. It is, rather, meant to plead for precision in argumentation, and for a realization that whatever verdict we may pass on the book's historicity, it is written as history, not as farce.
Footnotes
1.
For the syntax of 2.5 (…יבבט וטשו הדיבה ןשושב היה ידוהי שיא), compare Job 1.1, and see Avi Hurvitz, ‘The Date of the Prose-tale of Job Linguistically Reconsidered’, HTR 67 (1974), pp. 28–30; compare also 2 Sam. 12.1, and the discussions of R. Rezetko, ‘Dating Biblical Hebrew: Evidence from Samuel—Kings and Chronicles’, in Ian Young (ed.), Biblical Hebrew: Studies in Chronology and Typology (JSOTSup, 369; London: T&T Clark International, 2003), pp. 236–37, Ian Young, ‘Is the Prose Tale of Job in Late Biblical Hebrew?’, VT 59 (2009), pp. 617–18, and the further references in each.
2.
For the semantics of the word ידהי here, see recently Moshe Bar-Asher, ‘Il y avait à Suse un homme juif—ךדיבה ןשושב היה שיאי’, REJ 161 (2002), pp. 227–31.
3.
Timothy S. Laniak, Shame and Honor in the Book of Esther (SBLDS, 165; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), p. 66.
4.
Erich Gruen, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 145.
5.
André LaCocque, Esther Regina: A Bakhtinian Reading (Rethinking Theory; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), p. 32. Compare also, e.g., Elsie R. Stern, ‘Esther and the Politics of Diaspora’, JQR 100 (2010), pp. 25–53 (48): ‘[T]he plain-sense reading of the text is chronologically impossible’.
6.
Adele Berlin, Esther (JPS Bible Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2001), p. 25; Jon Levenson, Esther: A Commentary (OTL; Louisville/London: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997), pp. 57–58.
7.
Esther 2.6 is entirely missing from the Greek Alpha Text, although its view on the matters at hand is clear from elsewhere (see immediately below); see Karen H. Jobes, The Alpha-Text of Esther: Its Character and Relationship to the Masoretic Text (SBLDS, 153; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), p. 187, for a suggestion regarding this omission.
8.
This is the text of the Old Greek version. The Alpha Text omits some of the phrases, but the point is just as clear. The two versions are available side-by-side, in translation, by Karen H. Jobes, in the New English Translation of the Septuagint (ed. Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 426.
9.
Earlier than that Targum, the Bavli apparently takes for granted that Esther was a descendant of Saul (b. Meg. 13b), but the exegesis behind this claim is not made explicit, and Kish is not mentioned in that context.
10.
Bernard Grossfeld, The First Targum to Esther: According to the MS. Paris Hebrew 110 of the Bibliothèque nationale (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1983), pp. 10 and 43 (punctuation mine).
11.
Grossfeld, The First Targum, pp. 28–29 and 64–65. A similar genealogy is provided in the midrash Panim Aḥerot B—printed in Solomon Buber, Sifre de-Aggadeta li-Mgillat Esther (Vilna: Romm, 1887), pp. 62–63. For discussion of this text, see M.B. Lerner, ‘The Works of Aggadic Midrash and the Esther Midrashim’, in Shmuel Safrai et al. (eds.), The Literature of the Sages, Second Part: Midrash and Targum, Liturgy, Poetry, Mysticism, Contracts, Inscriptions, Ancient Science, and the Languages of Rabbinic Literature (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 195–201.
12.
For further references to this story of David and Shimei, and discussion of the problems in this telling of it, see Grossfeld, The First Targum, pp. 92–93.
13.
Note, however, that in Panim Aḥerot B, p. 62, the claim is made that Mordecai and Esther descended both from Shimei of David's time and from Saul (despite the fact that, according to the genealogy given there, there were only six generations between Saul and Shimei).
14.
Both are found in what Buber printed as Panim Aḥerot B, but the second occurrence is actually a separate midrash; the manuscript's copyist wrote תודחא םינב before this one, as well, but Buber eliminated that line in his edition. In any event, see pp. 62–63 and p. 79 in Buber, Sifre de-Aggadeta.
15.
Lerner, ‘The Works of Aggadic Midrash and the Esther Midrashim’, p. 223.
16.
Michael G. Wechsler, The Arabic Translation and Commentary of Yefet ben ‘Eli the Karaite on the Book of Esther (Karaite Texts and Studies, 1; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2008), p. 196.
17.
See his comments in Mordechai Leib Katsenelenbogen, Torat Hayyim: Megillat Esther (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 2006 [Hebrew]), p. 52.
18.
See the commentary of the French Sages in Katsenelenbogen, Torat Hayyim: Megillat Esther, p. 56.
19.
Michael G. Wechsler, ‘An Early Karaite commentary on the Book of Esther’, HUCA 72 (2001), pp. 101–37 (110 and 128–29).
20.
His comments can be found in Katsenelenbogen, Torat Hayyim: Megillat Esther, pp. 53–54; see also Barry Walfish, ‘The Two Commentaries of Abraham Ibn Ezra on the Book of Esther’, JQR 79 (1989), pp. 323–43 (338 and 339).
21.
Katsenelenbogen, Torat Hayyim: Megillat Esther, p. 54 (Hebrew punctuation mine). The text reads ויבא יבא, rather than ויבא יבא יבא; see Katsenelenbogen's n. 226 ad loc.
22.
See his comments on v. 6 in Katsenelenbogen, Torat Hayyim: Megillat Esther, pp. 55–56. The same position, that Kish was Mordecai's great-grandfather but that it was Mordecai who was exiled, is found in the commentary of R. Moses b. Isaac Haliawa, who probably lived in the fourteenth century (Katsenelenbogen, pp. 53–55; for brief biographical discussion of this little-known scholar, see Katsenelenbogen's introduction to the volume, pp. [17]-[18]).
23.
C.F. Keil, The Books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther (trans. Sophia Taylor; Clark's Foreign Theological Library, 4th series, 38; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1873), pp. 335–36. Keil himself argues that (a) the Kish mentioned is the famous father of Saul, (b) Mordecai is the head of the relative clause in 2.6, (c) Mordecai could not have been 125 years old when he became vizier, and therefore (d) ‘he was exiled’ means ‘he was the children of exiles’. Incidentally, Keil rejects the suggestion that the Mordecai of the story of Esther is to be identified with the Mordecai named in Ezra 2.2 and Neh. 7.7, on the grounds that ‘Identity of name is not, however, a sufficient proof of identity of person’. The ‘identity of name’ is precisely the argument he relies on for the claim that Kish is the father of Saul, however.
24.
For this example and others not mentioned here, I am indebted to Richard Steiner. Altogether there are at least a dozen examples where the relative clause unambiguously refers to the noun immediately preceding it.
25.
L.B. Paton, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Esther (ICC; New York: Scribner's Sons, 1908), p. 168, and see also p. 73.
26.
For a detailed appreciation, see the comments of Gersonides in his commentary on Esther; cf. Katsenelenbogen, Torat Hayyim: Megillat Esther, pp. 53 and 153–55. Among modern scholars, discussions of the connections between Esther/Mordecai and Saul, and Haman and Amalek, are legion; see especially Yitzchak Berger, ‘Esther and Benjaminite Royalty: A Study in Inner-Biblical Allusion’, JBL 129 (2010), pp. 625–44, and Jonathan Grossman, Esther: The Outer Narrative and the Hidden Reading (Siphrut, 6; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), pp. 70–72, 81–82, and passim, as well as Yairah Amit, ‘The Saul Polemic in the Persian Period’, in Oded Lipshits and Manfred Oeming (eds.), Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns), pp. 647–61.
27.
Levenson, Esther, pp. 57–58.
28.
For a far-reaching discussion of the associations of Mordecai and Esther with Saul, see Berger, ‘Esther and Benjaminite Royalty’.
29.
Amos Hakham, ‘Esther’, in Da'at Mikra: Hamesh Megillot (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1973), p. 14 (the pagination begins anew in every section of this book, so this is p. 14 of the commentary on Esther, towards the end of the volume).
30.
I lay out my reading of the book in Chapter 2 of my forthcoming monograph, Queen of Politics: Esther in the Context of Second Temple and Rabbinic Intellectual History.