Esther

Welcome back to the Eccles Bible Project, where we present the books of the Bible to atheists and other backsliders. Following on from Judith we now have, according to the Catholic and Orthodox listing, the book of Esther.

Richard Dawkins, you've read this book as part of your homework. Would you like to stand up and tell the class what it's all about?

Well, I've only read the first chapter and the last chapter, as that's enough for a clever man like me to work out what's going on. Indeed, if you look on my website you can read the first and last chapters of The God Delusion for free, and they hardly even mention God because I was thinking of something else at the time.

ACTUALLY, I'M NOT A DELUSION, RICHARD.

What? Stop plugging my book? Oh, all right. Esther it is, then. Incidentally, this book doesn't mention God either, so obviously it supports my atheist pericope that we're just a mass of little cells, and that God is a delusion. Now, the book of Esther starts off with a King Assuerus, who is said to have reigned from India to Ethiopia over a hundred and twenty-seven provinces: he holds a great feast, and after seven days of eating and drinking he calls for his wife Queen Vashti, but she refuses to come in.

King Assuerus / Ahasuerus / Xerxes / Artaxerxes enjoys a feast.

Actually, that sort of thing happens to me a lot too. After the seventh day of a feast at New College, Oxford, many a learned professor might ask his wife to come along and drive him home, but she might equally well have gone off in the Tardis in disgust. By the way, may I point out that Assuerus, or whatever you call him, almost certainly didn't exist? I'm a trained biologist and I know these things. Esther didn't exist, either. Or India. Or Ethiopia.

Now, the other chapter I've read, Esther 16, contains a letter sent out by Artaxerxes. It does mention Esther, but only briefly. He seems to be going on about some chap called Aman being disobedient, and the Jews being well-behaved. Basically nothing much happens in this book, and they're too ashamed even to mention Jesus or Mohammed. End of.

An 'appy ending: Aman is 'anged.

Thanks, Richard. I'll give you 2 out of 10 for effort there. You did miss a few details, in fact. There's a Jew called Mardochai / Mordecai who saves the king's life, there's a man called Aman / Haman who wants M. killed, and there's a Jewish woman called Esther who becomes a friend of the king and invites him to several dinners; in the end she contrives for Aman to be 'anged, er, hanged, on the gallows he built for Mardochai.

By the way the ``expanded" version of Esther's book does mention God, but this is not the version accepted by most Protestants. My brother Bosco, who thinks that God wrote the King James Bible and that all other versions are mistranslations of the KJV, would certainly not approve of it.

That's Life! Esther, Mordecai and Haman offer an oddly-shaped parsnip to King Assuerus.

So next time we'll discuss Job. He was a bundle of laughs and no mistake...

Nehemiah

So it's welcome back to our class of atheists and other beginners, as we resume the Eccles Bible project after the break. I hope you all had a Merry Christmas (er, just Mas in your case!), and wish you a Happy Nehemiah.

Anyway, to recap, here we are in the 5th century BC, and the Jews have been in exile in Babylon. As we saw last time, Ezra (Esdras) has brought some of them back to Jerusalem.

What ho, Nehemiah! Any chance of one of your pick-me-ups?

This is the tale of Nehemiah, the cup-bearer of King Artaxerxes of Persia, who retrains as a builder (or maybe architect) in order to get Jerusalem rebuilt. Ezra turns up again later in the Book of Nehemiah, and he is now billed as a priest and scribe,

Our hero rebuilds the walls of Jerusalem.

In the above picture Nehemiah is presumably the one reading the plans, rather than the ones doing the actual building, but one can never be sure. Perhaps the other chaps are the sons of Hassenaah, who built the Fish Gate (see Chapter 3); or possibly Malchiah the son of Rechab who was told to repair the Dung Gate. It was a true poet who named these gates.

This is what Nehemiah has on his scroll.

Actually, talking of Gates, we have Bill and Melinda here today in our Bible class for the first time. Welcome, guys! No mention of Windows in this book, I'm afraid, but I suppose you'll enjoy Jeremiah when we get to it, with its For death is come up through our Windows. I wonder whether Jerry was thinking of you there?

Half way through the book, Ezra attends to the spiritual needs of the people (now that their deliveries of fish and dung have been sorted out), and after a bit of prayer and penance they once again promise to keep the Law.

A delivery of fish.

Nehemiah actually becomes the effective governor of Jerusalem; he later pops off back to Persia to do some more cup-bearing, before returning to find that the Jews have gone off the rails yet again. So he fixes that.

In next month's instalment we have a choice: we can follow the Protestant Bible and jump straight onto Esther (so to speak), or take the Catholic and Orthodox line, and include Tobit and Judith.

Tobit or not Tobit? That is the question.

We'll discuss Tobit next. Class dismissed.