Abstract
This essay responds to Carol A. Newsom's recent call for finer-grained studies of particular formulations of the moral self and agency in biblical and related Second Temple texts in two ways: first, drawing on cognitive linguistic research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, it highlights the embodied metaphorical quality of all forms of self-conception and self-representation; second, it examines the network of conceptual metaphors of the self in the Hebrew text of Esther, especially as they speak to questions of subjective agency. Although the book of Esther draws several of its conceptual metaphors from other Hebrew biblical texts (e.g. the heart as self, the self as fillable, the self filled with wine, the self filled with heat, heat abating or dissipating from the self, etc.), it deploys them in such a way as to call into question any delusion of self-control and agency on the part of its royal patriarchal subjects, Ahasuerus and Haman. Instead of affirming agency, these metaphors conceive of the self as easily manipulated and unsettled, thereby revealing a highly insecure subjectivity that is never fully in possession of itself.
1. Introduction
In her 2011 presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature, Carol A. Newsom turned the attention of many biblical scholars toward a new horizon for research, namely, critical analysis of the different ways that selfhood, especially moral selfhood, is conceived in the Hebrew Scriptures and related texts from Second Temple Judaism. As with her past innovations in the field, part of what makes this new horizon so potentially generative of new insight is the way it brings the literary and social-historical analysis of scriptures into conversation with scholarship in fields outside biblical studies—in this case, neuroscience and cultural psychology, especially as they raise questions about the culturally specific roles of religion in the formation of human subjectivity.
Newsom begins with the insight from neuroscience that there is a close relationship between religious experience and experience of oneself as a subject. The same anatomical structures and mental processes are involved in both kinds of experience, suggesting that the two have co-evolved in humans. 1 It follows, then, that religion is among the most important ‘cultural means by which a unified or executive self—what can also be described as conscious agency—is constructed and maintained’. 2 Insofar as the ‘inner life’ of religious experience both influences and is influenced by the social-cultural life of particular religious beliefs, practices, and institutions, how do these aspects of religion within particular historical-cultural contexts both shape and reflect different understandings of the self and the self's sense of its agency in the world? How, moreover, might differences in these understandings represent historical change?
Newsom's specific interest, then, is historical as well as cultural-psychological: to ‘trace the changing conceptions of the self’ from early biblical texts, especially in Deuteronomic discourse, to later Second Temple texts, especially those concerned with Torah obedience in the religiously and culturally diverse contexts of the Jewish Diaspora. Based on the comparative apparatus developed by indigenous psychologists Paul Heelas and Andrew Lock, she identifies three main ‘models of the moral self’ in the Hebrew Bible and related Second Temple texts: 3
Moral agency is affirmed. This is the ‘classic’ Deuteronomic psychology of the moral self—what Heelas and Lock call the ‘idealist model’. 4 This model understands the nature of control to be by the self (the self is actively in control of its own thoughts and actions, as opposed to passively being controlled by another) and the locus of control to be internalized (within the self, as opposed to by forces external to the self). This model, which is ‘made thematic’ in Deuteronomic discourse, presumes full internal self-control of one's agency in the world. ‘There is nothing wrong with the human moral “equipment”. Each person is capable of and responsible for his or her own moral choices’. 5
Moral agency is…impaired, but the impairment can be overcome. Newsom divides this model into two subcategories: internally impaired moral agency (e.g. by innate human impulses), most fully expressed in the Damascus Document, where the model serves as a ‘tool and mechanism for recruiting and binding new members to the sectarian organization’; and externally impaired moral agency (e.g. by demonic forces), which is common in many Jewish texts by the mid-second century and becomes ‘a staple of early Christian moral thought’. 6 According to both models, although there are forces that may impair one's ability to make moral choices, one has the power to gain and maintain control over those forces and is therefore responsible to do so.
Moral agency is denied—with certain exceptions. This model, which diverges radically from the Deuteronomic model of the self in control, ‘builds on terminology from Genesis 6, as well as Genesis 1 and 2, in order to question whether the majority of humanity possesses moral agency at all—not because of any demonic interference but as a result of the way in which they were created’. 7 This model is represented in the pre-sectarian 4QInstruction, which envisions the creation of two different kinds of humans: those created spiritually in Genesis 1 ‘in the image of gods’ with moral agency, and those created in Genesis 2 from dust, as the ‘spirit of flesh’ who are the non-elect majority of human beings, without moral agency. 8 In the Hodayot, on the other hand, selfhood is conceived as ‘an inner contradiction’ between these two origins, the divine and the fleshly. In both discourses, the elect insiders are exceptions to the general rule that denies moral agency to humans.
Newsom is well aware of the challenges to historicizing these different models, placing them along a continuum of cultural-historical change or evolution. Different models of selfhood and moral agency can and do coexist in the same cultural context, even in the same text, thereby making it difficult to distinguish cultural difference from cultural change. 9 Even within a particular cultural system, moreover, we might expect different conceptions of self and agency to be applied to different people, distinguishing their moral selfhoods in terms of class, gender, sex, age, and so on. Beyond that, there are the complex relationships between language and experience, representation and construction already introduced by putting the neuroscientific emphasis on universal anatomical systems and mental processes into conversation with the anthropological focus on culturally specific conceptualizations of the self and subjective experience. On the one hand, how do different cultural discourses of the self shape different human experiences of selfhood? On the other hand, how does embodied human experience shape those different discourses?
It is with these and other challenges in mind that Newsom concludes her address with a call for ‘more fine-grained study of particular formulations’ in biblical and related Second Temple literature. 10
I hope to respond to this call in two ways: first, by highlighting another dimension of all forms of self-conception and self-representation, namely their metaphorical quality, especially as developed in the recent cognitive linguistic research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson; and second, by examining the network of conceptual metaphors of selfhood in the Hebrew text of Esther, especially as it speaks to questions of agency.
2. Conceptual Metaphors and the Embodied Self
In Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that all human conceptions of the self are conceptual metaphors, and that all metaphorical systems for expressing and experiencing ourselves as selves are rooted in our embodied experiences in the world. Building on earlier research by Andrew Lakoff and Miles Becker, they identify a basic split within human consciousness, a division of the person into two basic parts: the Subject and the Self (or Selves). 11 On the one hand, the Subject is ‘that aspect of a person that is the experiencing consciousness and the locus of reason, will, and judgment, which, by its nature, exists only in the present’. The Subject, then, is the self-representing ‘I’, ‘you’, or ‘she’. On the other hand, the Self is ‘that part of a person that is not picked out by the Subject. This includes the body, social roles, past states, and actions in the world. There can be more than one Self.' 12 The Self, then, includes those aspects of a person that the Subject refers to as its third-person object, as in ‘I [Subject] need to get hold of myself [Self]’, or ‘There goes his [Subject] mind [Self]’.
Lakoff and Johnson show that the relationship between these two parts of the inner life of a person is metaphorical: the Subject is the target, that is, the conceptual domain one tries to represent or understand with the metaphor; and the Self is the source, that is, the conceptual domain from which one draws one's metaphorical images. So the Subject conceives of and represents its Self in terms that are, at their most basic level, metaphors. And these metaphors are all drawn from everyday, embodied experience in the world.
There is tremendous variety in the culturally specific ways by which the Subject metaphorically conceives of the Self. ‘There is no one Subject-Self distinction, but many. They are all metaphorical and cannot be reduced to any consistent literal conception of the Subject and Self.' 13 Yet, Lakoff and Johnson argue,
…the multifarious notions of Subject and Self are far from arbitrary. On the contrary, they express apparently universal experiences of an ‘inner life’, and the metaphors for conceptualizing our inner lives are grounded in other apparently universal experiences.
These metaphors appear to be unavoidable, to arise naturally from common experience. 14
Indeed, they find that all metaphorical ideas of the Self, in all their diversity, fall into three general categories:
Self as person (e.g. ‘I am at war with myself’, or ‘you need to calm yourself down’, or ‘he had convinced himself’);
Self as object (e.g. ‘I lost my head’, or ‘you turned me on’, or ‘she picked herself up’); and
Self as location (e.g. ‘I am off my rocker’, or ‘you're out to lunch’, or ‘she's beside herself’)
Significantly, all three types of metaphors are clearly tied to everyday, embodied experience in the world: relating to others (Self as person), controlling and manipulating things around us (Self as object), and feeling more or less comfortable and oriented within difference spaces (Self as location). Cultural particularities in conceptions of the self are evident in the wide variety of metaphors used, even while these particularities are grounded in common, everyday human experiences as social bodies in the world.
3. Metaphorical Conceptions of the Self in the Hebrew Bible
A key metaphor for conceptualizing the self in the Hebrew Bible is the בל, ‘heart’ or ‘mind’. As Newsom points out, the ‘heart’ is part of the ‘fundamental grammar’ of the self in the Hebrew Bible. It is ‘The locus of the person's moral will, and it is this organ that is responsible for a person's words and actions… It is the executive self.' 15 Yet it is not simply an organ; it is, in Lakoff and Johnson's terms, a metaphorical conception of the self as object, which can be manipulated not only by its subject but also by external forces, such as God or another subject. 16
In Deuteronomic discourse, the heart functions alongside other terms (e.g. שפנ, ‘life’ or ‘soul’) as a primary metaphor of the self-as-object for configuring its devotional orientation, or lack thereof, toward God vis-à-vis obedience. Read most literally, it is an object that the subject uses to mediate a relationship of devotion toward God. Right orientation of the human heart is toward God, expressed primarily by holding God's commandments, as in the first two verses of the Shema: ‘Love Y
Elsewhere in Deuteronomy, the heart as self is a metaphorical object that may be ‘turned’ or ‘faced away’ from God and God's commandments. Thus, in Deut. 29.18, ‘It may be that there is among you a man or woman, or a family or tribe, whose heart (בל) is already turning away from (דצמ…הנפ, “facing away from”) Y
In all these texts, the heart is not essentially one with and the same as the subject. The subject has a self, metaphorically conceived as an object (most commonly בל), with which she or he does things: loving with it, holding commandments with or on it, and turning it toward or away from God. The subject and the self are not the same. Both grammatically and metaphorically, the subject—I, you, she, he, they—does things to and with its self. Thus, as in Lakoff and Johnson, the biblical sense of self expressed by the heart metaphor assumes that there is a gap between the subject and its self. The subject both conceives of and performs its self as other within.
By focusing on the metaphorical conception of the self as heart-object in Deuteronomy, then, we may see how moral agency is affirmed discursively in metaphorical language that is rooted in embodied experience in the world. The subject and its self are not one; the subject shows right devotion by controlling and orienting its self toward God and God's commandments. Ideally, the self is conceived as an object that is under the total control of its subject in ways that affirm moral agency in the form of self-control. The subject expresses devotion and obedience by loving with her or his heart, by keeping commandments upon her or his heart, and by turning her or his heart in the direction of the indirect object of devotion and obedience. Left unguarded, the heart may turn or be turned away. But the self as heart-object does not resist the subject's manipulation of it. The subject is in control of its self, and is therefore morally responsible for what she or he does or does not do with it.
4. Metaphorical Conceptions of the Self in the Book of Esther
It should surprise no one that the book of Esther does not appear in Newsom's preliminary research on models of the moral self in Second Temple Judaism. Among Second Temple biblical texts, it is in many respects the odd one out. God is never mentioned or even alluded to in the text. Neither is Torah, and neither is any other form of specifically Jewish religious practice. Indeed, there is reason to suspect that the canonical Hebrew text intentionally avoids any such reference. 17
Neither are there any direct references to moral struggles in the inner lives of any of the characters in Esther. There are, of course, references to obedience and disobedience: Esther does as Mordecai commanded in ch. 2; Mordecai does as Esther commanded in ch. 4; Vashti refuses to come and be displayed before the king and the other men in ch. 1; and Mordecai refuses to bow before Haman in ch. 3. But none of these acts of obedience or disobedience are explicitly described as a matter of making good or bad moral choices. Even if the text may encourage sympathy with both Vashti and Mordecai in their refusals, it never explicitly indicates that either one did so out of a sense of right, let alone obedience to a higher authority.
Yet the book of Esther is centrally concerned with issues of Jewish identity and agency in the context of the culturally and religiously diverse Diaspora, especially as such issues relate to effective agency vis-à-vis the life-and-death identity politics of gender and ethnicity. What, then, might an examination of metaphorical conceptions of the self in Esther offer to the larger project of the history of models of the self and moral agency in Hebrew biblical literature generally and Second Temple Judaism specifically?
As in Deuteronomic discourse, the ‘heart’ (בל) is a key term in the metaphorical grammar of the self in the book of Esther. Unlike in Deuteronomic discourse, however, here it appears within a larger network of metaphorical terms, all rooted in embodied human experience, that work together to disavow agency, conceiving the self as easily manipulated and unsettled by external forces, and revealing its subject as insecure and out of control. This network of conceptual metaphors of the self includes the following terms: 18
בל (‘heart’): the primary object-metaphor for the self
אלמ (‘fill’): what happens to affect the self (as heart-object or as person)—it is filled with things that settle or unsettle it
המת (‘heat’ or ‘fire’; figuratively ‘rage’): what fills and unsettles the self
ךכש (‘abate’ or ‘empty’): the self can be drained of the heat that fills it
בוט (‘good’, including in the sense of prosperity and completeness): describes the self as settled and secure (the opposite of ‘filled with heat’)
ויי (‘wine’): associated with the pleased and therefore settled self (e.g. the heart can be pleased, בוט, by being filled with it)
Taken together, these terms work to conceive metaphorically of the self as a kind of vessel or container that is easily filled with and emptied of things that immediately destabilize or restabilize its subject. 19
Note, moreover, that this is not a general metaphorical conception of the self; it does not characterize all selves in the narrative, but only those of King Ahasuerus and Haman. In fact, the book of Esther never explicitly conceives of the inner lives of its Jewish heroine Esther, its Jewish hero Mordecai, or the story's only other sympathetic character, Vashti. 20 Although we may infer from context certain inner feelings that these characters might have (e.g. indignation motivating Vashti's and Mordecai's refusals to honor Ahasuerus and Haman, fear in the Jewish people facing genocide, desperation in Mordecai when he appeals to Queen Esther to help deliver the her people, and tremendous anxiety in Esther in her process of disclosing aspects of her identity inimical to her social context), 21 the narrative never describes such feelings, let alone actually conceiving of them metaphorically in terms of an inner life of the self. 22 What we have in Esther, then, is not a conception of the self in general but a subversive conception of the inner life of the patriarchal, non-Jewish self in power that exposes that self as easily manipulated, volatile, and insecure.
The first instance of the metaphor of the self as heart-container is on the seventh and final day of King Ahasuerus’ second celebratory drinking party:
On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was pleased with wine (וייב ךלמה־בל בוטב), he told Memuman, Biztha, Harbona, Bigtha and Abagtha, Zethar and Carkas, the seven eunuchs attending in his presence, to bring Queen Vashti before the king, wearing the royal crown, in order to show the people and the officials her beauty, for she was good looking. (1.10–11)
As I have argued elsewhere, the king intends this moment to be the culmination of his public display of his greatness, a means of consolidating his power as royal male subject. 23 Even as his explicit aim in throwing the parties is to ‘display’ (תא…ותאדהב) his honor and greatness (1.4), so he wishes to ‘display’ (תא…תואדהל) his queen as good-looking object (1.10). Indeed, he treats her as an external self-as-object of his own subjectivity. Displaying her as his quintessential object is actually a display of his own subjectivity as quintessential royal patriarch. And he does so precisely when his ‘heart is good with wine’, that is, when his inner self, his heart-object, is happily filled with wine—settled, pleased, seemingly stable.
That good-hearted, stable self is immediately unsettled, however, when Vashti refuses to come to be displayed, thus refusing to be an object that his subject controls. And that refusal of control over her as external object upsets his inner self, metaphorically displacing the wine in his heart with fire: 'heat (המח) burned in him (וב)’ (1.12). Suddenly he appears as highly unstable and insecure, filled with a volatile substance, ‘heat’ or ‘fire’.
A settled (בוט) self does not return to the king until Memucan's proposal—prefaced, as every proposal will be, by ‘if pleasing (בוט) to the king'—to reestablish this patriarchy by decree, so that ‘all women give honor to their lords, from great to small’ (1.16–20). This ‘pleased’ (בטייו) the king (1.21), indicating the resettling of his subjectivity, after which ‘the heat of the king abated’ (ךלמה חמח ךשב, 2.1), draining from his self like chaotic waters abated at the end of the flood (Gen. 8.1, which uses the same verb for “abate”). 24
The same metaphoric system of self appears in Haman, especially in his interactions with Mordecai. First, after Haman's promotion, when Mordecai refuses to bow and do obeisance before him, he is ‘filled with heat’ (המח ןמה אלמיו), upset, unsettled. As was the case with Ahasuerus, Haman's subjectivity is destabilized by Mordecai's refusal to reflect well on him, to be a good external object of his subjectivity, and that sense of the self's unsettling is metaphorically conceived as being literally filled with heat. As was the case with Ahasuerus in the wake of Vashti's refusal, moreover, Haman's state of heat-filled selfhood will be overcome by a kingdom-wide royal decree, this time to annihilate all Jews. Significantly, as that law is disseminated, Haman and the king get back to drinking, settling their selves back down by refilling them with wine, which, in the book of Esther, invariably signifies a happy, stable self—however oblivious it is of what is really going on: as they sat down to drink, ‘the city of Susa was in confusion’ (3.15).
Later, in ch. 5, we find Haman once again ‘pleased of heart’ (בל בוט), having built a gallows to execute Mordecai, who had just been honored by the king. But when he encounters Mordecai at the gate and Mordecai neither rises nor trembles before him, his self is once again upset: ‘and Haman was filled with heat about Mordecai’ (המח יבדרמ־לע ןמה אלמיו). Here again, the self as pleased heart is upset when he is filled with heat—not by his own doing as subject but by his undoing by an external force, Mordecai, who refuses to be a good and pleasing object for Haman's subject. 25
Finally, during Esther's second drinking party with Haman and the king, when she finally reveals that she is Jewish and begs that she and her people be delivered from the genocide decreed for them, the apparently astonished king asks, ‘who filled his heart [ובל ואלמ] to do this?’ (7.5). We have seen the self in a settled state, full of wine (‘good with wine’), and in an unsettled state, full of heat. Here, the king asks who (i.e. what subject) has filled his self, as heart, with something to do—something we as readers know is intended to drain that subject's heart of heat and restore its stability, no doubt accompanied by wine.
The metaphor of the self as a container being filled with something from God is familiar in the Torah and other early biblical texts: God ‘filled them [skilled artisans] with wisdom of heart’ (בל־חמבח םתא אלמ) to do their work (Exod. 35.35; cf. Exod. 28.3; 31.5; 35.31); Joshua is ‘filled’ with God or God's spirit (Deut. 34.9 and Josh. 14.8); and Micah is ‘filled’ with divine power (Mic. 3.8). In these passages, the sense is that God endows a person with a specific kind of self—an artisan, a leader, a prophet—by filling (אלמ) him or her with the wisdom or spirit needed to take on that role. In Est. 7.5, by contrast, the conception is of a subject who constitutes his own preexisting self-as-heart by filling it himself. Who, Ahasuerus asks, has filled his own heart to do this?
This particular conception of the self as a heart filled by itself (rather than by God) with something to do appears only here and in Eccl. 8.11, where the preacher laments that, because it takes so long for bad deeds to be punished, one ‘fills the heart (בל אלמ) to do bad’. Both texts are commonly interpreted in terms of audacity or boldness: Who would have the audacity to do such a thing? But the more literal sense of this metaphorical conception would suggest not being bold so much as doing bold, that is, moving one's self-as-heart to do something by filling it with that very doing.
Of course, the obvious answer to the king's question—'Who filled his heart to do this?'—is that both he and Haman did. Or, more precisely, it was Haman who filled the king's heart to do it—and he did so by first filling the king's purse with cold cash. Indeed, the king's self-as-heart-as-vessel is not only unstable, highly susceptible to upset, but it is also extremely impressionable, easy to fill by others, perhaps especially when accompanied by the promised pleasure of wine, women, and wealth. In fact, never once in the book of Esther does the king deny a request or proposal, each of which claims to have his good pleasure in mind (‘if it pleases the king’, 1.19; 3.9; 5.4, 8; 7.3; 8.5; 9.13).
5. Selves in Diaspora
The network of conceptual metaphors of the self in Esther that I have outlined briefly here exposes the inner lives of Haman and Ahasuerus as unstable and vulnerable. Their selves are conceived as atheistic and amoral containers easily filled and emptied of good or bad things, that is, things that settle or unsettle their subjects. Although the book of Esther draws several of its conceptual metaphors from other Hebrew biblical texts (e.g. the heart as self, the self as fillable, the self filled with wine, the self filled with heat, heat abating or dissipating from self, etc.), it deploys them in such a way as to call into question any delusion of self-control and agency on the part of its royal patriarchal subjects. Instead of affirming agency, these metaphors conceive of the self ostensibly in power as easily manipulated and unsettled, thereby revealing a highly insecure subjectivity that is, literally, never fully in possession of itself. Here then is a self that appears on the furthest fringe of Newsom's third category: agency disavowed, with no exceptions.
Disavowed, that is, only insofar as it is revealed. For the narrative conceives of the inner lives of no one but Haman and Ahasuerus. Those of Esther, Mordecai, Vashti, and others remain veiled and unreadable. In this respect, the text's rhetoric of the self participates in a larger narrative dynamic of disclosure and non-disclosure, especially as it relates to the character of Esther. As both Persian royalty and the other Jew who is marked for oblivion by Persian royal decree, Esther is both same and other, ‘us’ and ‘them’. Her mutually incompatible, ‘socially impossible’ selves exceed any single location within the social order that has been established, and her strategic self-revelation as such destabilizes formerly stable relations, unsettling both Haman's and the king's selves. 26 Not that Esther had been hiding her various socially incompatible identities. Rather, she is in control and chooses when and how to reveal them. Self-control is thus linked here to the self's inaccessibility.
Likewise with regard to the book of Esther itself. Although we cannot help but infer things about the self of its narrator (not to mention the author[s], editors, and others responsible for the creation and transmission of its text), 27 she reveals nothing. Who has filled her heart to tell such a tale? Like Esther, she is as in control as she is inaccessible, exposing the inner lives of patriarchal others and, in the process, both their lack of control and their lack of awareness of how out of control they actually are.
With regard to both the character and the book of Esther, then, the unconceived, perhaps inconceivable self is the one in control. In that light, although the book of Esther does not offer a conception of moral agency per se, perhaps there is nonetheless a moral to its story for Jews in Diaspora, after God and after Torah: keep your selves to your self.
Footnotes
1.
Patrick McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 32–38; summarized in Carol A. Newsom, ‘Models of the Moral Self: Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism’, JBL 131 (2012), pp. 5–25 (6).
2.
Newsom, ‘Models’, p. 6.
3.
Paul Heelas, ‘The Model Applied: Anthropology and Indigenous Psychologies’, in Paul Heelas and Andrew Lock (eds.), Indigenous Psychologies: The Anthropology of the Self (Language, Thought, and Culture; London: Academic Press, 1981), pp. 39–63; Andrew Lock, ‘Universals in Human Conception’, in Heelas and Lock (eds.), Indigenous Psychologies, pp. 19–36.
4.
Heelas, ‘Model Applied’, pp. 39–43, discussed in Newsom, ‘Models’, pp. 8–9.
5.
Newsom, ‘Models’, p. 15.
6.
Newsom, ‘Models’, pp. 17–18.
7.
Newsom, ‘Models’, p. 21.
8.
Newsom, ‘Models’, p. 22.
9.
Newsom, ‘Models’, p. 25.
10.
Newsom, ‘Models’, p. 26.
11.
Andrew Lakoff and Miles Becker, ‘Me, Myself, and I’, unpublished manuscript, University of California, Berkeley, 1992.
12.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books 1999), pp. 267–90.
13.
Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, pp. 267–90.
14.
Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, pp. 267–90.
15.
Newsom, ‘Models’, p. 10.
16.
Throughout their discussion, Lakoff and Johnson capitalize Subject and Self, presumably in order to distinguish their use of these terms from other more generic uses (in which they are often used interchangeably). Although I do not capitalize them in what follows, I am assuming their specific definitions for both terms, including the notion of the self as in some sense other than its subject.
17.
See David J.A. Clines, The Esther Scroll: The Story of the Story (JSOTSup, 30; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984), pp. 107–12, who identifies nine religious references to God or gods in the main body of the Greek AT, and argues that at least some of these religious ‘pluses’ in the AT indicate religious elements that were present in the earlier Hebrew Vorlage for both the AT and the
18.
Accepting the argument of Lakoff and Johnson that all conceptual metaphors of the Self are rooted in embodied human experience, I translate these terms as literally as possible. For example, in keeping with the metaphorical conception of the self as object that holds things within it, the more literal translation of המת as ‘heat’ or ‘fire’ is to be preferred over ‘rage’.
19.
This sense of heart as vessel or container differs from the metaphor of Self as container in Lakoff and Johnson, where it is categorized not as an external object to be manipulated but as a location that the Subject is either within or without (e.g. ‘I'm out of my head’ or ‘I'm overflowing with joy’). See Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, pp. 267–90.
20.
As I have argued elsewhere, the significance of Vashti as a sympathetic character in the narrative is supported by strong parallels in
21.
While the present study aims to focus exclusively on literal metaphorical conceptualizations of self, much may be inferred about the inner lives of Esther and other characters via other approaches. See, e.g., the excellent essay by Joshua A. Berman, ‘Hadassah Bat Abihail: The Evolution from Object to Subject in the Character of Esther’, JBL 120 (2001), pp. 647–69, which, among other things, draws on recent psychological and sociological research to unpack the context of ‘coming out’ in Esther and the inner conflicts and stresses such a process would involve.
22.
The additions in the Greek version of Esther may be understood as a compensation for the lack of windows onto the inner lives of the Jewish selves in the Hebrew text, especially in Mordecai's inner pondering of his dream in Addition A, his interpretation of it in Addition F, and the highly emotional intercessory prayers of both Mordecai (explaining his religious motivations for refusing to bow before Haman) and Esther (‘seized with deathly anxiety’, fleeing to God in prayer, begging to be saved from her own fear) in Addition C. For a suggestive discussion of the deconstruction and reconstruction of Esther's self in her prayer, see Lawrence M. Wills, ‘Theology before Asceticism? Jewish Narratives and the Decentering of the Self’, JAAR 74 (2006), pp. 902–25, esp. pp. 908–909.
23.
Beal, Book of Hiding, pp. 15–28.
24.
See also 6.1, where the king's unsettled subjectivity is described as an insomnia in which ‘sleep deserted’ or ‘fled from’ (הררנ) him. Here again, the king does not appear to be in control of his self, as sleep leaves it restlessly awake.
25.
See also 6.6, where Haman ‘said in his heart’, a common expression in the Hebrew Bible for thinking or talking to oneself. Insofar as he literally says something 'in his heart’ (ובלב), this image offers some support of the conceptualization of the self as heart that is fillable (it has space in which Haman speaks).
26.
In Esther's self-revelation itself, she asks the king to give her שפנ, ‘life’ (7.3). In this context, the term may mean not only life but self, as in ‘give me my self’, insofar as she uses it in the context of revealing a formerly undisclosed aspect of her identity (see also Newsom, ‘Models’, pp. 11–12. Likewise when Haman finds himself begging Esther for his שפנ (7.7), which has just been completely unsettled and put in jeopardy. See Beal, Book of Hiding, pp. 96–101, and ‘Esther’, pp. 87–94. For ‘socially impossible’, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 39.
27.
Most scholars assume that the Hebrew text of Esther not only represents Diaspora Judaism but also originates in the Diaspora. But see Elsie R. Stern, ‘Esther and the Politics of Diaspora’, JQR 100 (2010), pp. 25–53, who argues that we consider Esther ‘not diasporic but rather.a book written from within the land of Israel about the Diaspora’ that articulates ‘a post-exilic Judean view of Diaspora’ (p. 30). As such, she argues, Esther is a nationalistic pro-Judean parodic ‘fantasy’ that employs ‘a barrage of comic techniques to demonstrate that Persian imperial culture and the forms of Jewishness that develop and flourish within it are meticulous reversals of a fantasy of life in the land of Israel that was being propagated and transmitted in Judea throughout the Persian and Hellenistic periods’ (p. 32). In the process, Stern invites critical thinking about the cultural construct of Diaspora, which presumes a peripheral dispersion vis-à-vis a religious and cultural center.