Esther Brownsmith
ebrown8@udayton.edu
I begin this article by presenting a joke, taken from the book of Esther, chapter 1, verse 7.
Question: “How abundant was the wine at King Ahasuerus’s drinking party?”
Answer: “As abundant as the king’s ‘hand’!”
To be fair, it does not sound that funny to modern ears. Previous commentators did not read it as a joke; Moore labels it “translation uncertain,”[1] while Holmstedt and Screnock explain seriously that it “builds on the metaphorical meaning of יד [yad, hand] as ‘power’ and results [in] the idiom, ‘according to royal power.’”[2] But what makes this an off-colour joke is the observation that yad, “hand” in ancient Hebrew, was a euphemism for the penis. In other words, saying that something is “as abundant as the king’s hand” is not referring to the hand at the end of his arm.
On its own, pointing out that the book of Esther has a couple of off-colour jokes is hardly a revelation. The book is infamous for its carnivalesque tone, bawdy implications, and topsy-turvy humour.[3] But noticing the joke draws attention toward the use of the word “hand” in Esther more broadly, and that use follows a fascinating pattern. There are twenty-two mentions of hands in Esther; some are literal hands, but most use the word as a metaphor for power or control. Four of those hands belong to King Ahasuerus; four belong to unnamed officials or couriers; four belong to the Jewish people; and two belong to Haman. But a full eight instances of hands—double the mentions of anyone else—belong to the eunuchs of the story.
This is particularly ironic, of course, when we go back to the euphemistic meaning of the word, because eunuchs are precisely those who have a missing or defunct “hand”—specifically, a “hand” that is unable to procreate and produce offspring. This is no coincidence. Through its focus on the active hands of eunuchs, the book of Esther is making an argument about the royal world of its setting. That argument pushes back forcefully on what Lee Edelman called “reproductive futurism”: the insistent focus on children as a locus for our hopes and dreams. In the book of Esther, power reproduces queerly, outside lines of biological lineage. The king may have his showy gestures, but his eunuchs are the ones who actually act—a revolutionary message when it comes to ancient structures of power.
I begin with an examination of yad as a euphemism: where else does it mean “penis,” why should it mean that here, and what other biblical and extrabiblical connotations did it have? In the second part, I turn to eunuchs: how were they understood in the ancient Near East, and how do they function in biblical literature? I particularly linger on Isaiah 56:3–5, one of the crucial texts for understanding eunuchs in the Hebrew Bible. Finally, I turn to an overview of the book of Esther and what it has to say about hands and lineages. I conduct this survey in the light of queer theory about reproduction, which illuminates how the text was originally functioning to subvert the power structures of its time. In the end, I argue that all those “hands” matter; they point toward a radical questioning of normativity that is as relevant in our own time as it was in the author’s.
Taking a Metaphor in Hand
My argument relies on a central theme: the metaphorical evocation of the hand. It should be noted that this metaphor is in good company; ancient Semitic languages used a variety of body parts as metaphors, from the liver signifying emotion to the throat signifying life. The hand in particular, as our tool for interacting with the world, came to be associated with ability and action—with potency, in other words.
For instance, in Deuteronomy 5:15 and elsewhere, YHWH famously encourages the Israelites to remember how he brought them out of Egypt with his “mighty hand and outstretched arm.”[4] This is not a literal anthropomorphic description but a metaphor: God’s power is physical ability, with the hand serving as a concrete metonym for the body’s ability to do things.
It is also important to note that this was no dead metaphor; there are several places in the Hebrew Bible where the physical hand and the metaphorical hand are both evoked. Judges 4:9 provides a clear example. The Israelite general Barak has asked the prophet Deborah for help, and she predicts to him that YHWH will deliver the enemy general Sisera “into the hand of a woman.” The obvious meaning, in context, is that Sisera will submit to Deborah’s own power. But in the end, the literal hand of a different woman, Jael, hammers a tent-peg into Sisera’s head, killing him. It is the vitality of the metaphor—the fact that it means both abstract power and a body part—that makes the prophecy so clever.
While the full metaphorical range of the Hebrew hand is beyond the scope of this article, most of its various idioms are connected to those senses of power, ability, and control.[5] This is true both in the biblical text and in the rabbinic works that followed; for instance, in the Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 88b says, “the hand of a woman is like the hand of her husband”:[6] a woman’s power to act legally can be equated to her husband’s. Likewise, Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah was quickly nicknamed “hayad haḥazakah,” “the mighty hand.” This referred to the fact that it was fourteen books, as fourteen is the numerological value of yad—but the name also alluded to the book being as massive in scale and scholarship as the hand of the divine.[7]
In addition to these puns, though, the hand could specifically appear as a euphemism for a different kind of potency. It is well accepted that in ancient Hebrew, genitals could be signified euphemistically by other body parts, such as the thigh or the feet.[8] And this is precisely what we also see with the hand.[9] There are some passages where this meaning is fairly unmistakeable, such as this line in the Community Rule of the Dead Sea Scrolls:
The one who brings out his “hand” from under his clothing, so it flutters up (?)[10] and his nakedness is visible, will be punished for thirty days. (1QS [Community Rule] 7.13-14)
While the verb for what the clothing is doing is disputed, the broader meaning is clear: revealing your “hand” means making your nakedness visible. We see the same metaphor twice in Isaiah 57:
You have covenanted with them; you have loved their bed; you have gazed at [their] “hand.” (Isaiah 57:8b)
You found vigour for your “hand,” so that you did not wilt. (Isaiah 57:10b)
The first line makes little sense if taken literally. More importantly, a more abstract metaphorical meaning is also unsatisfying in the context of the concrete physical verb “gaze,” ḥzh. One does not “gaze” at power; one gazes at a body part. Likewise, the idea of the “hand” as something that “finds life/vigour (ḥayyat) and therefore does not wilt/tire (ḥalit)” clearly evokes genital arousal—specifically penile arousal, despite the feminine second-person verbs that address Israel as a licentious woman.[11]
A little later in Isaiah, the same euphemism actually helps to solve a historic crux. The standard Hebrew text accuses God’s people of profane behaviour, including “sacrificing in gardens and burning incense on the bricks.” This line has inspired considerable speculation: what would be profane about sacrificing incense on bricks? But when we turn to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Great Isaiah scroll offers us a very different reading for this phrase. It says that they are “sucking ‘hands’ on the stones,” i.e. engaging in oral sex on (sacred?) stones. If that reflects an earlier version, it would be unsurprising for a scribe to censor out the obscene image with vaguely religious actions.[12]
[They] are sacrificing in gardens and sacrificing incense on the bricks. (Isaiah 65:3b, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia)
They are sacrificing in gardens and sucking/emptying out “hands” on the stones. (Isaiah 65:3b, Dead Sea Scrolls)
Moreover, this euphemism is not limited to the biblical text. We see it at least twice in Ugaritic texts, and in both of them, the “hand” in question belongs to the king of the Ugaritic deities, Ilu or El. The first of these, in the myth of the Gracious Gods (KTU 1.23:33-34), takes place within a story about how Ilu is walking along the beach, and two young women catch his eye. In response, the Ugaritic says, “the ‘hand’ of Ilu lengthens like the sea.”
The “hand” (yd) of Ilu lengthens like the sea,
indeed the “hand” of Ilu, like the tide.
Lengthen, o “hand” of Ilu, like the sea,
indeed the “hand” of Ilu, like the tide.
(KTU 1.23:33–34)
Ilu proceeds to take them to his house, engage in some innuendo-laden manipulation of his “staff” or “rod,” and impregnate them. In this context, his “hand” can hardly mean anything other than his penis.
A separate story, part of the Baal Cycle, similarly mentions Ilu’s “hand”[13]—and this one is particularly relevant to the book of Esther, since it takes place in a royal court, albeit the divine court. Ilu is trying to sweet-talk his wife, the goddess Athiratu. First he offers her a banquet, including wine from golden cups. Then he turns to seduction, asking her,“Perhaps the ‘hand’ of Ilu the King excites you, the love of the Bull arouses you?”
Drink wine from goblets;
from a cup of gold, [drink] the blood of branches!
Perhaps the “hand” of Ilu the King excites you,
the love of the Bull arouses you?
(KTU 1.4 IV:36-39)
Smith and Pitard have argued that the words “hand” and “love” here “are hardly abstract in meaning, but are quite concrete, referring to passion … or making love. The word yd bears a further nuance of El’s particular lovemaking organ.”[14] I agree that the “hand” is innuendo, but I would add that there are layers to the metaphor. Ilu’s yad does refer to his penis, but it is also representative of his kingly power and generosity as he shows hospitality to his wife.
To be clear, I would hesitate to argue that this specific Ugaritic passage was known to the author of Esther. But it is nevertheless fascinating to see the parallel between the golden goblets and royal “hands” of KTU 1.4, and the details of Esther 1:7:
The drinking was from vessels of gold, vessels from a variety of vessels, and the royal wine was as abundant as the king’s ‘hand.’ (Esther 1:7)
If we read innuendo into the passage about Ilu’s “hand,” it seems very reasonable to me to read innuendo into this passage from Esther as well. And in case readers miss the joke, the author repeats it a chapter later. Esther 2:18 describes the celebrations initiated by the king in honour of Esther becoming queen. In addition to hosting a banquet and providing some sort of holiday to the provinces, he “gave gifts like the king’s hand.”
It is worth noting that the word “gifts” (mas’et) is a relatively unusual noun that derives from the root nasa’, “to lift up.” So what the king is giving is literally “a raising-up like the king’s hand.” The joke is slightly different from its first appearance, but in both cases, its humour stems from comparing the size of the king’s generosity to the size of the king’s physical assets. He is hypergenerous, hypermasculine, hypersexual. This is parody through hyperbole.
Further confirmation of the innuendo comes from an additional parallel passage. The Hebrew words for “hand” and “king” are hardly unusual or unique, but this particular construction—k’yad hammelekh, “like the king’s hand”—actually only appears in three places in the entire Hebrew Bible. Two are these passages in Esther, and the third is in 1 Kings 10:13: the end of the story of the Queen of Sheba. There, we find an innuendo-laden verse about how Solomon gave the Queen of Sheba “all the desires that she requested,” a phrase that Rashi interprets overtly as sexual intercourse.[15] The verse adds that these were “in addition to what he gave her like the ‘hand’ of King Solomon.” It seems quite plausible that the author of Esther picked up on the innuendo of this verse and amplified it to hypermasculinise King Ahasuerus.
Whose Hands?
With this euphemism established, I turn to an examination of eunuchs and their narrative connotations. The author of Esther seems to have used “hand” twice as a euphemism for the king’s penis—but “hand” is a common word with a broad range of metaphorical associations in Biblical Hebrew, and that author was familiar with all of them. Probably the most prominent metaphorical meaning for the hand is “power,” both in the abstract sense of “a person’s ability to do things” and in the more mundane sense of “a person’s possession.” In the book of Esther, for instance, the king sends a message to Vashti via some eunuchs—or, literally, “in the hand of the eunuchs” (1:12, 15). He later has Esther and her fellow concubines placed “in the hand” of Hegai the eunuch (2:3,8), i.e. under his control or supervision. The same phrase of “sending out a hand”—to plan or enact violence against someone—is used to describe both the eunuchs plotting against the king and Haman plotting against Mordecai. All in all, hands appear twenty-two times in the book of Esther, and it would be absurd to argue that all twenty-two cases are intended as innuendo.
Nonetheless, when we look at those twenty-two cases as a whole, a fascinating pattern emerges. Despite Mordecai and Esther’s centrality to the story, there are no references to their hands whatsoever. In fact, no female characters have their hands mentioned, metaphorical or otherwise. Instead, the king’s hands appear four times: twice in the innuendo I discussed, and twice as literal physical body parts (3:10 and 5:2). Four times, the owners of the hands are unspecified royal courtiers or messengers (3:9, 3:13, 6:9, 8:10). Twice, the hands belong to Haman as he plots violence (3:6, 8:7). Four times, all in the penultimate chapter of the book, the hands belong to the Jewish people (9:2, 10, 15, and 16)—to whom I will return later. But a full eight times (1:12, 1:15, 2:3, 2:8 x2, 2:14, 2:21, 6:2), the hands belong to eunuchs, named or unnamed.
This is no random distribution. The use of “hands” reflects neither the narrative focus of the story, which lifts up Esther and Mordecai, nor the purported power structures of the palace, with the king as supreme actor. (In fact, if my euphemistic reading of the “king’s hand” is correct, then all four references to his hands allude to his physical appendages, not metaphors for his power.) To the contrary, it is the eunuchs whose “hands”—always used metaphorically—are acting again and again in the story.
In the context of broader scholarship on the book of Esther, this is quite remarkable. For example, Michael Fox’s influential analysis, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther, has individual chapters about all the book’s major characters, from Vashti to the Jews to even God, who is never overtly mentioned. But his only comment on the eunuchs is a passing remark that “the author tends to view eunuchs and other palace servitors as friendly.”[16] This attitude toward the book’s eunuchs as background characters, despite their names and centrality to several plot points, permeates most mainstream scholarship on the book. Indeed, the only scholarship that discusses them at length is by scholars who are overtly applying a queer lens to the book.[17] This is a tangential point, yet one worth making: queer and other supposedly secondary approaches can often help us move past lingering academic biases and offer a clearer view of what’s actually in the text.
Regardless, the eunuchs of the story seem to be doing a lot with their hands. But what are they doing? All eight of the instances are using “hand” in a metaphorical or idiomatic sense. In fact, in the NRSV translation, the word “hands” is entirely absent from all of these verses. It says that Vashti’s message was “conveyed by the eunuchs.” It says that the women in the harem were “under custody of” Hegai and Shaashgaz. And it says that Bigthan and Teresh “conspired to assassinate” the king. In short, the English translation renders these hands entirely invisible. This is especiallyinteresting with regard to the idiom of “stretching out hands against someone,” because it is the exact same idiom that both the eunuchs and Haman enact, with the same meaning of plotting violence against a person. But the NRSV translates it as “assassinating” for the eunuchs and “laying hands on” for Haman. His hands are visible in translation; theirs are not.[18]
But in light of the first section of this article, this repetition of hands is a comic irony. Eunuchs are defined precisely by their lack of a fully functioning “hand,” a “hand” that could beget children. (I deliberately leave this statement vague, because people with a variety of genital configurations could be considered eunuchs in the ancient world.) The book of Esther is famous for its peripety—its use of unexpected turn-arounds and reversals of fortune—and this is just one example, albeit one that has not previously been noted. But I want to argue a step further: this abundance of eunuchs’ hands is more than just a comedic in-joke. In order to make that argument, I will step back and look more broadly at what it means to be a eunuch.
Because of modern phallocentric social assumptions, it would be easy to assume that the lack of a functioning penis made the ancient eunuch less of a man, or at least other than a man. Indeed, popular contemporary analyses of eunuchs have often read them alongside non-binary and intersex persons. The motive for this is understandable and evident in Chris Paige’s conclusion to a chapter about ancient eunuchs, which states, “as we look back through time, may we find our ancestors smiling back at us from familiar and unfamiliar places.”[19] If eunuchs, who were acknowledged but often marginalised in the ancient world, have modern kin, then surely it is those today who live outside binaries of gender and sex. Yet this equation has also been rightly challenged by scholars like Joseph Marchal, who notes that “an unreflective, ahistoricizing identification of intersex people with eunuchs has the potential to reinforce the assumed naturalness, normalcy, and timelessness of the current and rather particular understanding of gender, sexuality, and embodiment.”[20] Likewise, de Araujo notes that “the eunuch’s ‘effeminate’ nature, his ‘homoerotic’ behaviour, and other aspects supposedly related to castration, reproduc[e] views that are strongly contaminated by Classical and modern Western Orientalist descriptions of the institution.”[21] In short, the physical and social status of ancient eunuchs needs to be studied outside of an imposed set of modern assumptions, even when those assumptions view themselves as inclusive or natural.
A linked but distinct issue to the real historical experiences of eunuchs is the literary trope of the eunuch. In other words, while recognising that historical eunuchs understood themselves in terms that do not always align with our modern gender divisions, can we nonetheless use modern language to think about how fictional eunuchs functioned literarily? In 2013, Sean Burke argued that “eunuchs can be read as queering figures because they trouble and destabilize the intersecting discourses of gender, sexuality, class, and race that produced the ancient constructions of masculinity.”[22] This idea of queerness as destabilisation, which fully accepts that the specific discourses it destabilises will vary from era to era, is an appealing way to categorise eunuchs. Yet even here, we must tread with caution, because queerness is a term that carries connotations about sexuality, and those connotations cannot be applied automatically to ancient eunuchs. What, then, did characterise ancient eunuchs as literary figures?
To answer this question, it will be helpful to turn from the biblical text alone to an analysis of eunuchs more broadly in the ancient Near East—particularly the Mesopotamian region that comprises Esther’s setting. Later in Burke’s discussion, when he asks why eunuchs were sought-after in royal courts, he summarises five reasons given by contemporary scholars—and his first two have nothing to do with gender instability or queerness in a modern sense:
First, they were prized for their loyalty, but rulers also considered them not to be threats because they could not establish their own rival dynasties. Second, they were particularly dependent on their masters because they had not only been removed from their families of origin, but they were physically incapable of establishing their own families through procreation.[23]
These two reasons—both connected to a eunuch’s inability to procreate and establish a biological lineage of his own—align with other modern arguments about Assyrian and Achaemenid eunuchs.
There has been a recent flourishing of interest in eunuchs in the ancient Near East, where there is substantial visual and written evidence for their widespread presence.[24] By most accounts, eunuchs were known as ša rēši, literally “those of the head”; their name distinguished them from ša ziqni, “those of the beard,” i.e. uncastrated courtiers. As in the book of Esther, these ša rēši could attain very high ranks in the court, and we even have images of them going to war and bringing back war spoils. We also see this in textual evidence, like a treaty that Zakûtu wrote to guarantee the succession of her grandson, Assurbanipal. When she considers who might be “fomenting or instigating rebellion” against the king, she first lists off “bearded ones” and eunuchs as an apparent merism to describe the population of courtiers.[25]
Taking in this substantial iconographic evidence of eunuchs in Assyria, Omar N’Shea argues that “the beard is not shorthand for the masculine maturity and ethnic identity (which the eunuchs did possess) of the males of Assyria, but rather of fatherhood.”[26] Indeed, eunuchs’ “reconfigured biology and redefined masculinity granted them power and privilege. Eliminating the possibility of procreation granted them the loyalty to and of the hyper-hegemonic male in the Neo-Assyrian state hierarchy.”[27] By this reasoning, eunuchs are not non-men; they are a special category of men, one defined by their lack of lineage. De Araujo concurs, arguing that artistic depictions of eunuchs served as “uncanny” images because they “infer the act of castration, which, in an ANE context, probably induced feelings of unease among the non-castrated male elite, especially by evoking the notion of barrenness.”[28] These figures functioned precisely because the men of the court related to them enough to fear the barrenness that being a eunuch entailed.
On that note of barrenness, I now turn to what is probably the most discussed text about eunuchs in the Hebrew Bible: Isaiah 56:3–5. In this passage, YHWH promises good fortune to the foreigners and eunuchs who choose to follow him.
Let not the foreigner who has joined with YHWH say, “YHWH will certainly separate me from his people.”
And let not the eunuch say, “look, I am dried-up wood.”
For thus says YHWH: “To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose what pleases me, and who firmly grasp my covenant,
I will give them, in my own house and walls, ‘a hand and a name’ better than sons and daughters—
an everlasting name will I give them, one which will not be cut off.” (Isaiah 56:3–5)
My translation above is not a standard English translation. “Hand” does not fit here literally, so virtually everyone translates it as “memorial” or the like. There is indeed biblical precedent for translating “hand” as a metaphor for a memorial,[29] something set up by a great man to preserve his memory.
A particularly relevant passage is 2 Samuel 18:18, an authorial aside about David’s son Absalom:
Absalom, during his life, had taken and set up a stone pillar in the King’s Valley, for he thought, “I have no son to memorialise my name,” and called the pillar after his own name. It is still called “Absalom’s ‘Hand’” today. (2 Samuel 18:18)
We see here that “hand” could mean a pillar memorial, and that as a memorial, it was understood to compensate for the lack of a child, as an alternate way to preserve memory. I am not the first to wonder whether there is some innuendo here at calling the pillar erected by a man a “hand.”[30] In fact, Rachelle Gilmour brings out the narrative function of this innuendo: “The phallic shape of the yad monument in the landscape, supplemented by word play in the multiple meanings of the word yad, visually mocked Absalom’s lack of sons.”[31] So yes, yad vashem can and should be translated as “a memorial and a name”—which is why it was chosen as the name of the Israeli Holocaust Museum. But that does not negate the possibility of a deliberate double entendre in Isaiah.
This passage in Isaiah is critical to my argument for multiple reasons. The first is that it is yet another passage that puns on eunuchs and their lack of “hands,” a fact recognised by Joseph Blenkinsopp in his major commentary:
There is also an underlying lusus verborum, [i.e. a pun] since a tertiary meaning of yād is “penis” (Isa 57:8, 10; Cant 5:4–5; cf. raglayim, “feet,” for the genitals, Isa 6:2; 7:20; 1 Sam 24:4); so the eunuch is promised a yād that will not be cut off (ʾăšer loʾ yikkārēt).[32]
So the book of Esther was not the only place to make this kind of pun. But then Blenkinsopp continues with his analysis:
Combined with this is the stock expression “to cut off the name” (cf. Isa 14:22; 48:19), equivalent to obliterating the memory of someone. This seems to have been thought of as the real and final death, since the name and descendants (zeraꜥ, “seed”) are inseparable (cf. Isa 66:22 “your seed and your name”).”[33]
In this passage, the problem that eunuchs encounter is not that they embody “liminal” figures of genderqueerness in any modern sense.[34] The problem is that they have no sons and daughters—no way of perpetuating their name and their memory. This fate dovetails with my above discussions of eunuchs in the ancient Near East, and it is exactly why YHWH promises them a metaphorical hand: because their lack of it in one metaphorical sense can be remediated by acquiring it in another sense. Phallic disability[35] is made whole by memorialisation.
Childlessness in Esther
In this final main section, I return to the book of Esther and draw these themes together. The fact that this passage from Isaiah connects to Esther, with its talk of eunuchs and hands, is particularly interesting and ironic because the eunuchs’ major complaint—“look, I am dried-up wood”—stands in stark contrast with the total lack of attention in the book of Esther to reproductive concerns. Not only are its eunuchs uninterested in children; the desire for procreation is essentially absent throughout. Children appear exactly twice in Esther: in the initial edict to annihilate all Jews, including women and children (Esther 3:13), and in the second edict for Jews to annihilate their enemies, including women and children (Esther 8:11). We also hear of Haman’s ten sons, of unknown age (Esther 5:11)—and, by the end of the book, we see their dead bodies on display (Esther 9:14). But neither Esther nor Vashti bears the king any children; nor does Mordecai have any children of his own; nor does Esther know her own parents. Indeed, the closest we see to a “normal” heterosexual family unit is Haman’s family, and all its males end up dead—so much for the future. Esther is a book where children are neither present nor longed-for, and in this way, it distinguishes itself from much of the Bible.
The contrast is especially clear when we compare Esther with the book of Ruth, the only other biblical book to bear a woman’s name. As Nielsen summarises the plot of Ruth, “famine and childlessness are overcome through Ruth’s marriage to Boaz and the birth of the desired son.”[36] This son—and then the genealogy of the sons who will descend from him—represents the climax of the book, the resolution of the problems posed by barrenness and death in the first chapter. In this way, the book of Ruth stands as a monument to what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism”: the overriding principle that the Child is “the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value,”[37] a beacon deserving of sacrificial preservation. “The children are our future,” as Whitney Houston sang; all political policies and moral decisions must value them above all else.
I am not the first to notice that this principle is evident throughout the Hebrew Bible, where children are longed-for and the success of a person, male or female, is measured by their lineage. Another late biblical example is the book Ezra-Nehemiah and its obsession with the question of intermarriage and its progeny; Ezra commands that children be sent away along with their foreign mothers (Ezra 10:3), while Nehemiah is appalled to discover children speaking non-Hebrew languages (Nehemiah 13:24). Some scholars have even suggested that the reason Queen Esther is childless is to dodge questions about a Jewish woman bearing a Persian king’s son. Regardless, the book of Esther stands out from most of the Bible in its deliberate avoidance of reproductive ideals. In her analysis of Deborah, Jael, and Judith, Caryn Tamber-Rosenau asks:
So what does it mean when a prominent female character in the Bible is not portrayed as having children of her own? I would argue that we can read the absence of children, fertility concerns, or any other child-related storyline from the tale as problematizing the reproductive futurism that prevails in most of the Bible.[38]
This statement is just as true of Esther as it is of those warrior women.
All that said, the argument that the book of Esther challenges reproductive futurism is initially an argument from silence; it reads into the absence of longed-for children, rather than the presence of some statement rejecting them. What my observations about the eunuchs and their “hands” provide is further evidence to bolster that silence. Not only are children absent, but the book aims an ironic spotlight on eunuchs, defined by their lack of biological progeny, and argues that they are the ones who hold the true power in this narrative. YHWH promised eunuchs a “hand and a name” in Isaiah 56, and the book of Esther provides both, quite literally: a full eleven eunuchs are named in the story, and their hands are mentioned eight times. Instead of a focus on children, we have a focus on the power of the childless.
But what does it mean to challenge reproductive futurism? To begin with, it means an openness to queerness. As Edelman made clear in No Future, the opposite of reproductive futurism is queerness, and vice versa.[39] But what is radical about Edelman’s argument is that it rejects both sides of the political spectrum. Rather, Edelman argues that by opposing reproductive futurism, queerness is outside and against politics as a whole, right or left wing. This is a special definition of queerness, distinct from sexual orientation—one in which the queer is that which is excluded by society, the person who is denounced or left in the shadows. But in response, queerness embraces jouissance, the wild and transcendent pleasure entwined with the death drive, a pleasure situated in the here and now. This jouissance connects to the carnivalesque features that have long been identified with the book of Esther:[40] the way it playfully subverts expectations, emphasizing the wild pleasures of drinking banquets and fancy clothing, mocking the king while looking to him as the ultimate authority.
These carnivalesque features make the holiday of Purim unsurprising when we look at Esther in its broader Jewish reception. Purim is a holiday dedicated to jouissance, a celebration of life in the constant shadow of death. In the words of HaRav Shagar, a postmodernist Torah scholar, “the joke of Purim is a joke of negation and nullification, the complete opposite of the affirmative fullness of the rest of the year, which stresses the positive and discussable.”[41] The associations of Purim developed over time and after the biblical text, certainly, but just as the book of Esther is the foundation of the holiday, so does its queerness influence and sustain the broader queerness of Purim. The book of Esther, as I have argued elsewhere,[42] is deeply queer in every sense: it uplifts non-cisheteronormativity, it twists and perverts expectations, and it marks itself as unusual in the biblical corpus, as strange in its context of canon. It is queer as Edelman means the word, focusing on characters in the margins of society, and it is also queer as it imagines alternative structures of power in the world, structures that break out of the binaries of gender and the prisons of genealogy.
But it would be inaccurate to celebrate the queerness of the book of Esther without also acknowledging that, like so much queer expression, it also contains normativising impulses. Those impulses become clearer when we examine some of the other hands in the book. These final hands reiterate that when the author mentions someone’s hands, it is a very deliberate choice—but that not all those choices stem from resistance to hegemony.
As I noted earlier, one of the categories of characters whose hands we see was the Jewish people as a community, and all of those instances are at the end of the book. All four of them appear in the same idiom of “stretching out hands,” i.e. to act violently, that we also saw referring to Haman and to the treasonous eunuchs. For instance, Esther 9:2 says that the Jews “gathered together … to stretch hands against those who sought evil for them.” Commentators have historically wrestled with chapter 9; it is difficult to call something a happy ending when over seventy-five thousand people end up dead, even if those thousands are supposedly the enemies of the Jews. In fact, the other three instances of hands appear directly after the death tolls. In Esther 9:10, 9:15, and 9:16, the text counts up the total dead, then adds, “but as for the plunder, they did not stretch out their hands.” In other words, they killed the people but did not take their belongings. So of the four mentions of hands, three of them are negative: moments surrounded by corpses where the Jews had the power, the metaphorical upper hand, but refused to take advantage of it.
I believe this reflects an ultimate literary stabilisation, a return to the mainstream. The book started off by satirizing the extremes of royal power with references to the size of the king’s “hand,” and it followed that satire with its natural conclusion: power in the hands of the eunuchs. But in chapter nine, the eunuchs vanish, and the king only appears in the process of asking Queen Esther what she wants him to do. Power has shifted again, to the Jewish people as a community, and their use of that power is marked by restraint—by choosing not to stretch out their hands to take advantage. A synthesis has finally been reached: a synthesis that demonstrates what Gerrie Snyman called “a particular coloniality of being, that is, when the after effects of imperialism lingers on once the colonisers left.”[43] The “hand” metaphor demonstrates this internalised imperialism: by reiterating three times that the Jewish people showed restraint in the midst of their violence, it simultaneously affirms their generosity and their ultimate power over their neighbours. In the end, Esther’s Jewish author returns from the dangerous waters of eunuchs and carnival to a shallow celebration of the beneficence of his kinspeople.
Conclusion
The book of Esther repeatedly evokes the hands of eunuchs as a way of emphasizing its ironic, upside-down views on power and lineage. But in the end, it returns to a safer stance, where nationalistic ideals trump affiliation with the queer and the excluded.
The image above, from an 1841 oil painting, encapsulates this mixed message. This image is one of the only artistic portrayals I could find of Hegai, the eunuch who looks after Esther in the harem before she meets the king.[44] (To be precise, Esther is “put into his hand.”)
While there are many illustrations of Esther, Mordecai, Haman, and Ahasuerus, Hegai receives little attention from artists; even this painting is actually a detail from a larger painting, “The Toilette of Esther,” by Théodore Chassériau.[45] In the original painting, Hegai fades into the background, a contrast to Esther’s pale, nude body. But if we focus in on Hegai himself, we see someone with strong, muscled arms and fingers, someone whose physical hand is powerful indeed. Chassériau himself never married and was mixed-race, the Dominican-born grandson of a woman from Haiti. So as I look at this painting, I find myself wondering whether he saw some of himself in the dark-skinned Hegai, as he painted those detailed muscles and fingertips. Hegai’s genital configuration, like Chassériau’s race, marked him as an outsider, as a denizen of queer margins—yet in the upside-down world of the book of Esther, those margins could become a space to thrive.
By attending to the eunuch, whether in this painting or in the Hebrew Bible, we reveal a bittersweet message about priorities and the presence of strength. Chassériau lavished detail on Hegai’s muscled arm and capable fingers, but he ultimately relegated Hegai to the painting’s margins. Likewise, the book of Esther uses euphemistic wordplay to highlight the strength and masculine power of its eunuchs, thereby resisting the reproductive imperative of other ancient Jewish texts, but it also concludes by focusing on the power of the Jewish people to defend themselves and their children (Esther 3:13). In Esther, power can blossom in unexpected, queer places—yet even that power must conform to the hegemony of androcentric empire.
Bibliography
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——— Song of Songs. Vol. 7. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
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——— “The Hidden Body as Literary Strategy in 4QWiles of the Wicked Woman (4Q184).” Dead Sea Discoveries 27.2 (2020): 234–56. doi:10.1163/15685179-02702003.
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Tamber-Rosenau, Caryn. “The ‘Mothers’ Who Were Not: Motherhood Imagery and Childless Women Warriors in Early Jewish Literature.” Pages 185–206 in Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination. Edited by Marjorie Suzan Lehman, Jane L. Kanarek, and Simon J. Bronner. Jewish Cultural Studies. Liverpool: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2017.
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[1] Carey Moore, Esther, Anchor Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 7.
[2] John Screnock and Robert D. Holmstedt, Esther: A Handbook on the Hebrew Text (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015), 48.
[3] For humour, seeJoel S. Kaminsky, “Humor and Hope from Passover to Purim” (The Marginalia Review of Books, 12 April 2019, tinyurl.com/tv6ar8eh), Melissa A Jackson and Bert Young, “Horribly Hilarious: An Interpretation of Esther” (Review & Expositor 118.2 (2021): 224–30, doi:10.1177/00346373211023606), and the bibliography cited in the latter. For the carnivalesque, see Kenneth M. Craig, Reading Esther: A Case for the Literary Carnivalesque (Westminster John Knox, 1995), and Andre LaCocque, Esther Regina: A Bakhtinian Reading (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007).
[4] See also Exodus 3:19, where Moses warns that the Pharaoh will not let the Israelites go without a “mighty hand,” presumably that of their God.
[5] For an early summary, see Paul Joüon, “Divers emplois métaphoriques du mot «yad» en hébreu,” Biblica 14.4 (1933): 452–59; for a more recent summary, see Laura Higgins, “Cultural Linguistics and Religion: Human Anatomical Terms in the Holy Bible,” UNET JOSS (2021): 55–107, doi:10.52042/UNETJOSS010202, who uses a colourful illustration to summarize the biblical hand’s associations with “human action, innocence, purity, power, honor, strength, [and] power to give punishment.”
[6] Author’s translation. In general, biblical, rabbinic, and ancient Near Eastern texts are all my translations unless otherwise indicated.
[7] Herbert Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 214; see also Yossef Schwartz, “‘From Moses to Moses’: Late Medieval Jewish and Christian Interpretation of Moses’s Prophecy,” Religions 11.12 (2020): 632, doi:10.3390/rel11120632.
[8] See, for instance, the Anchor Bible Dictionary’s discussion (Marvin Pope, “Euphemism and Dysphemism in the Bible,” Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary I:720–25, especially 720–21), Gary A. Rendsburg, “Word Play in Biblical Hebrew: An Eclectic Collection” (in Puns and Pundits: Word Play in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Literature, ed. Scott B Noegel [Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2000], 137–62), and the recent summary by Laura Quick (“Behemoth’s Penis, Yahweh’s Might: Competing Bodies in the Book of Job,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 46.3 [2022]: 339–57, doi:10.1177/03090892211040537) on 347 n31.
[9] For discussions of this euphemistic meaning of yad, see especially Stefan Schorch, Euphemismen in Der Hebräischen Bibel (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 127–130, and Mathias Delcor, “Two Special Meanings of the Word יד in Biblical Hebrew” (Journal of Semitic Studies 12.2 [1967]: 230–40). Mathias Delcor’s conclusion that yd-as-phallus derives from the root ydd, “to love,” is speculative, but the evidence for the existence of the euphemism in both discussions is substantial and persuasive. Marvin Pope (Song of Songs [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], 517–18) also discusses the relevant evidence in order to argue for its euphemistic connotations in Song 5:4.
[10] Cf. Charlotte Hempel, The Community Rules from Qumran (Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 204. The verb is likely pwḥ, “to blow up,” or pwḥḥ, “to be raggedly dressed.”
[11]. Although these are the clearest examples of yad as phallus, they are hardly the only ones. For instance, Scott Noegel sees the euphemistic yad in Jeremiah 5:31, which would therefore be crudely translated as, “the prophets prophesy falsely / while the priests wave their dicks around.” (“Maleness, Memory, and the Matter of Dream Divination,” in Perchance to Dream: Dream Divination in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, ed. Esther J. Hamori and Jonathan Stökl [Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2018], esp. 73.) In an unpublished dissertation, Alan William Bernthal-Hooker argues that the dominating “hand of YHWH” and “hands of Dagan” are intended to evoke male genitalia (“You Shall Know Yahweh”: Divine Sexuality in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond [University of Exeter, 2017], particularly 206–207); see also Laura Quick, “Behemoth’s Penis, Yahweh’s Might,” for an argument for an overtly phallic YHWH. For the likely use of yad as euphemism in Ben Sira 51:19/20, see Takamitsu Muraoka, “Sir. 51, 13-30: An Erotic Hymn to Wisdom?” (Journal for the Study of Judaism 10.2 [1979]: esp. 171–72), and Annette Schellenberg, “‘May Her Breasts Satisfy You at All Times’ (Prov 5:19)” (Vetus Testamentum 68.2 [2018]: esp. 260, doi:10.1163/15685330-12341321). For the possible use of yad as euphemism for (female) genitalia in 4Q184, see Laura Quick, “The Hidden Body as Literary Strategy in 4QWiles of the Wicked Woman (4Q184)” (Dead Sea Discoveries 27.2 [2020]: 234–256, esp. 249, doi:10.1163/15685179-02702003). Finally, for a summary of ancient Near Eastern evidence, including Egyptian and Akkadian parallels, see Shalom M Paul, “The ‘Plural of Ecstasy’ in Mesopotamian and Biblical Love Poetry” (in Divrei Shalom: Collected Studies of Shalom M. Paul on the Bible and the Ancient Near East 1967-2005 [Leiden: Brill, 2005], esp. 247–248). (During his life, Paul received numerous credible accusations of sexual harassment by female students [see, tinyurl.com/yc4cruy7], a pattern of behaviour that casts disturbing light on his academic interest in texts of sexuality.)
[12] For more discussion, see Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 56-66, Anchor Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 271, and Pope, Song of Songs, 225; the latter spells out that “Fellatio would inevitably be suggested.” H.A. Brongers, in his review of The Meaning of the Qumrân Scrolls for the Bible, with Special Attention to the Book of Isaiah, by William Hugh Brownlee (Revue de Qumrân 5.2 [18] [1965]: 274–77), argues, “The passage in Isaiah 65,3 refers in any way to forbidden sexual practice, details of which remaining [sic] hidden to us.”
[13] Cf. the discussion in Mark Smith and Wayne Pitard, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle: Volume II. Introduction with Text, Translation and Commentary of KTU/CAT 1.3-1.4 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 521–22 for the detailed philological breakdown of this sexual advance.
[14] Smith and Pitard, Ugaritic Baal Cycle II, 522.
[15] Cf. Rashi’s commentary on I Kings 10:13 for interpreting this phrase as sexual intercourse (accessed at sefaria.org). As indirect evidence that it was read sexually by ancient Jewish exegetes, note that where the story of the Queen of Sheba is reproduced in Chronicles, 2 Chr 9:12 is identical to 1 Kgs 10:13 except for this phrase. The Chronicler replaces “what he gave her like the ‘hand’ of King Solomon” with “that which she brought to the king.” In other words, it removes Solomon’s sexual advances, which is entirely in line with how, for the Chronicler, “Solomon’s production is a representation of mono-sexual reproduction.” (Christine Mitchell, “1-2 Chronicles,” The Women’s Bible Commentary, 3rd Ed. [2012]: 184–91, esp. 188.) For a thoughtful discussion of the presence (or absence) of sexuality in the depiction of the Queen, see Jillian Stinchcomb, “Gender Performance and the Queen of Sheba,” Hebrew Studies 63.1 (2022): 37–54, doi:10.1353/hbr.2022.0002.
[16] Michael V. Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther, second edition (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2010), 60.
[17] For instance, Mona West, “Esther” (in The Queer Bible Commentary, ed. Deryn Guest et al. [London: SCM Press, 2006], 278–85), Randall Bailey, “‘That’s Why They Didn’t Call the Book Hadassah!’: The Interse(ct)/(x)ionality of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in the Book of Esther” (in They Were All Together in One Place: Toward Minority Biblical Criticism, ed. Randall Bailey [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009], 227–50, doi:10.5040/9780567677570), and Chris Paige, OtherWise Christian: A Guidebook for Transgender Liberation (OtherWise Engaged, 2019), 79–80.
[18] A similar trend occurs in the JPS, which avoids the word “hand(s)” for any of the eunuchs, but uses it twice for Haman. The KJV and NASB use “lay hands” as the idiom for both the treasonous eunuchs and Haman, but avoid it elsewhere. The NIV, NCB, and HCSB avoid “hands” in translating both the eunuchs and Haman.
[19] Paige, OtherWise Christian, 58.
[20] Joseph A. Marchal, “Who Are You Calling a Eunuch?! Staging Conversations and Connections between Feminist and Queer Biblical Studies and Intersex Advocacy,” in Intersex, Theology, and the Bible, ed. Susannah Cornwall (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 43, doi:10.1057/9781137349019_2.
[21] Matheus Treuk Medeiros de Araujo, “Achaemenid Court Eunuchs in Their Near Eastern Context: Images in the Longue Durée,” Anais do Museu Paulista 31 (2023): 5, doi:10.11606/1982-02672023v31e34, 5.
[22] Burke, Queering the Ethiopian, 95.
[23] Burke, Queering the Ethiopian, 101.
[24] Some major analyses include de Araujo, “Achaemenid Court Eunuchs,” Hayim Tadmor, “The Role of the Chief Eunuch and the Place of Eunuchs in the Assyrian Empire” (in Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East. Proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Helsinki [Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001], 603–11), Ilan Peled, Masculinities and Third Gender: The Origins and Nature of an Institutionalized Gender Otherness in the Ancient Near East (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2016), doi:10.25162/9783515130974, and the work by Omar N’Shea, including “Royal Eunuchs and Elite Masculinity in the Neo-Assyrian Empire,” Near Eastern Archaeology 79.3 (2016): 214–21, doi:10.5615/neareastarch.79.3.0214.
[25] Treaty of Zakûtu (Harper, Assyrian and Babylonian Letters 1239+, r.18-21).
[26] N’Shea, “Royal Eunuchs,” 218.
[27] N’Shea, “Royal Eunuchs, 219.
[28] De Araujo, “Achaemenid Court Eunuchs,” 21.
[29] E.g. 1 Samuel 15:12.
[30] For other discussions, see Edward Ullendorff, “The Bawdy Bible,” (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 42.3 [1979]: esp. 441), Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, “Burials” (Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary 1:785–89). and Noegel, “Maleness, Memory, and the Matter of Dream Divination,” 73–74. See also the argument of Robert Gordis (“A Note on Yad,” Journal of Biblical Literature 62.4 [1943]: 341–44, https://doi.org/10.2307/3262239), who proposes reading “his hands” in Job 20:10 as “his descendents,” thereby linking the hand once more to male procreation.
[31] Rachelle Gilmour, “The Monuments of Saul and Absalom in the Book of Samuel,” in Collective Memory and Collective Identity: Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History in Their Context, ed. Johannes Un-Sok Ro and Diana Vikander Edelman, Beihefte Zur Zeitschrift Für Die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 243–262, esp. 254.
[32] Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 56–66, 139.
[33] Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 56–66, 139.
[34] An anonymous reviewer rightly pointed out that “lack of procreative capacity and gender instability are [not] unrelated”—and certainly not in the ancient Israelite world, where virility was one of the most central aspects of masculinity (see Steffan Mathias, Paternity, Progeny, and Perpetuation: Creating Lives after Death in the Hebrew Bible [London: T&T Clark, 2021]). The eunuch, who lacked virility, would (like many biblical men!) certainly fall short of hegemonic male ideals. My point here is that their incomplete hegemonic masculinity does not implicitly reflect modern models of non-binary, intersex, or trans identity; as eunuchs, their inability to procreate was their defining trait.
[35] For more on eunuchs through the lens of disability studies, see Anna Rebecca Solevåg, “No Nuts? No Problem!” (Biblical Interpretation 24.1 [2016]: 81–99, doi:10.1163/15685152-00241p06) and Thomas Hentrich, “Masculinity and Disability in the Bible” (in This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies, ed. Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher, and Jeremy Schipper [Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007], 73–87).
[36] Kirsten Nielsen, Ruth: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 30.
[37] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 4.
[38] Caryn Tamber-Rosenau, “The ‘Mothers’ Who Were Not: Motherhood Imagery and Childless Women Warriors in Early Jewish Literature,” in Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, ed. Marjorie Suzan Lehman, Jane L. Kanarek, and Simon J. Bronner, Jewish Cultural Studies (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2017), esp. 192.
[39] Edelman, No Future, 28.
[40] E.g. Craig, Reading Esther, and LaCocque, Esther Regina.
[41] Alan Brill, “Rav Shagar on Adar- Infinite Jest- English Translation,” The Book of Doctrines and Opinions, 28 February 2017, tinyurl.com/bdhznk88.
[42] See my forthcoming monograph, Queen of the Alternate Universe: The Book of Esther as Fan Fiction, and recent conference papers, including “Love and Eunuchs: Esther and Ishtar as Queer Queens” (SBL Annual Meeting, 2021) and “Queering, Fearing, Persevering: Jewish and Queer Identity in Esther 8:17” (SBL Annual Meeting, 2022).
[43] Snyman, “Esther and African Biblical,” 1041.
[44] Another noteworthy artistic portrayal of Hegai is theatrical, in Peterson Toscano’s 2007 one-man play “Transfigurations: Transgressing Gender in the Bible” (released on DVD as Transfigurations: Transgressing Gender in the Bible, directed by Samuel Neff, written by Peterson Toscano, 2017, Barclay Press). Toscano vividly brings Hegai to life as he tells the experience of being a eunuch.
[45] Théodore Chassériau, Esther se parant pour être présentée au roi Assuerus (The Toilette of Esther), oil painting, 1841, Louvre, Paris. Image cropped from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
La_Toilette_d%27Esther.jpg, license CC-BY-SA-4.0.