RALEIGH, N.C. (RNS) — As the United States and Israel began pummeling Iran with airstrikes Saturday (Feb. 28), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered a biblical analogy to explain his motives for going to war.
“Twenty-five-hundred years ago, in ancient Persia, a tyrant rose against us with the very same goal, to utterly destroy our people,” Netanyahu said in a statement, referring to the story from the biblical Book of Esther, which takes place in Susa, or Shushan, then the capital of the ancient Persian empire, now Iran.
Then, as now, he said, “this evil regime will fall.”
It was a timely statement. Jews read the Book of Esther during the holiday of Purim, which begins Monday evening (March 2), recounting the heroine’s resilience and determination to save her people from the king’s evil adviser, Haman. Through the years, Jewish girls have dressed up as Esther during the boisterous holiday.
But Netanyahu was not the first to tie present-day battles to the Book of Esther. Since its inclusion in the Hebrew Bible, the story — only 10 chapters long — has been embraced in different ways and in different times by Jews and Christians around the world. An exhibit, “Esther in the Age of Rembrandt” — now on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh until Sunday — shows how the 17th-century Dutch looked to the Book of Esther for resonances with their own struggle for independence from Spanish rule. …