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Introduction If it pleases the king, let a royal order go out from him, and let it be written among the laws of the Persians and the Medes so that it may not be altered, that Vashti is never again to come before King Ahasuerus; and let the king give her royal position to another who is better than she. So when the decree made by the king is proclaimed throughout all his kingdom, vast as it is, all women will give honor to their husbands, high and low alike.” This advice pleased the king and the officials, and the king did as Memucan proposed; he sent letters to all the royal provinces, to every province in its own script and to every people in its own language, declaring that every man should be master in his own house. –—Esther 1:19-22 The book of Esther introduces the problem of gender relationships in the first chapter. The private dynamics between the king and the queen, who refuses to do as her husband asks, quickly become a matter for which the royal sages are consulted. Immediately, the counselors express their fear that this minor dispute will set a national precedent, impacting the relationships between men and women throughout the kingdom. The presumption of gendered dichotomies can be questioned for important reasons. Scholarly assessments of the book of Esther that focus on the category of gender tend to evaluate the story with regard to the degree to which it conforms to, or deviates from, a fixed set of gendered expectations. Biblical scholars have often argued that during periods of centralized authority, women are most often relegated to the domestic or private sphere, whereas men occupy the public. This viewpoint, however, is problematic; although patriarchy may in fact limit women’s roles in a variety of different ways, it is far too simplistic to 1 describe either women or men in these terms. Individuals gain and lose access to power and status through a variety of means over the course of their lifetime that are not determined along rigid gender lines. Furthermore, the notion of a separate and distinct public arena that can be clearly distinguished from the private is anachronistic to the biblical world.1 If discussing the terms public and private in relationship to male and female roles has served as a useful heuristic device to describe the limitations of patriarchy, it has also served to obscure the nuanced picture presented to us by the textual evidence that we have. One of the problems of focusing on separate spheres as a way of explaining gender dynamics is that the logic and the results of this work become self-perpetuating. Inasmuch as scholars have seen separate spheres for men and women as the essential interpretive framework for understanding patriarchy, and women’s role within it, they have then all too often applied their discussions of social phenomena to either men or women exclusively. The presumption of gendered dichotomies can be questioned for a variety of important reasons. For biblical scholars who have employed this language, there is a commonly held assumption that the increased centralization of political power that came with monarchy brought a sharper divide between public and private spaces, a move that impacted women in a negative way. This understanding is based primarily on anthropological analogy. There is more recent work from across a variety of scholarly disciplines that questions the use of these categories and their usefulness in describing women’s lives. The focus of this investigation is twofold. In the first place, I demonstrate the reliance on the categories of public and private in scholarship and the problems with applying these to the book of Esther. Furthermore, I suggest that Esther, when evaluated without the lens of the public/private discourse, may suggest the historical possibility of women’s participation in the life of politics, especially as political negotiators and counselors to royalty. Esther’s literary portrayal as a woman who continues in Israelite political traditions of women who counsel royalty has implications for how we understand postexilic life. On the one hand, the connection between Esther and other biblical women militates against the portrayal that Esther is in some way “exceptional”: she is not unique in biblical narratives in her ability to participate in and affect change in the political arena. On the other hand, portraying her as entirely conventional (that is, in close conformity to gendered expectations) is an overly 1. My argument does not...

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