Part 1

Even though the story of Esther is not historical (it bears many of the tropes and writing style of a folktale or historical romance), many modern scholars believe that the story still reflects many accurate details of the Achaemenid Persian court. Some, like Dr. Lloyd Lewellyn-Jones, even suggest that the story was written in Susa, in the 4th Century BCE, probably by a Jew with some connection to the royal court. If it was not written down during the Persian period, then an early version of the story was at least told under similar conditions. Esther even seems to have an accurate understanding of the layout of the Achaemenid palace in Susa.

However, Esther still contains a fair amount of artistic license, especially in regard to Esther's position as a woman in the royal court. This is the most complex question to answer by far:

The king's first wife is variously said to have been divorced, banished, and/or executed at the beginning of the story. What's the most realistic scenario for a royal marriage ending in the Achaemenid empire?

We don't have any record of Achaemenid wedding vows, but "Till death do they part" would be a fair summary in this case. Persian kings, and really kings in the ancient Near East in general, didn't end their marriages. Royal marriages were never just about love or even sex. Those could be part of the arrangement, but royal marriages always had political implications.

In some cases, it was a simple as producing potential heirs. Every child of the king had some kind of stake in the throne. More importantly, royal marriages were a way to shore up political allegiances in the empire. A direct family relationship with the king was valuable political commodity that could be secured by a marriage either to the king himself or one of his family members. Once again, this makes the progeny of any royal union important. Sons and daughters alike could be married off to secure political ties. Terminating a royal marriage would muddy the waters, leaving room for rumors of infidelity, bastard children, or secret legitimate heirs.

But there is a catch: the King of Kings never had just one female partner, and this is one of the bigger things that throws the whole story of Esther out of political reality.

Like many historical monarchs, the Achaemenid royal family operated within a harem system. The word "harem" itself is from Arabic and entered English via the Ottoman Empire. Applying it to ancient Persia is anachronistic and comes with a lot of baggage to unpack for modern audeinces. Personally, I think the word should be retired in favor of one of the many equivalent terms from other languages. However, I seem to be outvoted by the academic community at large.

Because of that, I feel obliged to offer a long aside about harems.

-- The most important thing to know is that we're not talking about the orientalist trope of a sexually depraved room full of scantily clad women at the king's beck and call. Nor are we talking about the later tradition of women being sequestered away from the world in specific part of the palace. The historical, Achaemenid harem (and its near contemporaries) refers to all of the women associated with the king, their children, and sometimes the royal family as a whole. That includes the king's wives, concubines, the Queen mother, and all of their servants. Many of these women were sexually available to the king, but many of them were officially unavailable for a number of different reasons.

Achaemenid royal and noble women were also not sequestered. They had freedom of movement, property, wealth, and homes independent of the king. They also dined and interacted with men at court. Sometimes they would live and travel with the royal court, but other times they would leave and hold their own sort of court at their personal estates. Were a king to want nothing to do with one of his wives, she would most likely be dismissed and told to go live on her own, possibly with her royal children. Those children would not be cut out royal legitimacy for all the reasons stated above.

However, there is a catch. While women were not forced to live in seclusion, privacy was a distinct privelege of the nobility. Today, fame and being well known in the public are the height of social prestige in most cultures. In the ancient Near East, the opposite was true. Anybody could be seen in public, but only the rich and powerful could live in private rooms or private homes and travel in closed carriages or litters. --

Because Purim is ultimately a holiday for dramatic storytelling, there are a lot of variations on Vashti's ultimate fate. Given the necessary permanence of royal marriages, execution could sound right, but killing highly placed noble woman had political implications too. Instead, the actual text of Esther makes it pretty clear.

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. Esther 1:19 NRSV

Overall, this seems very realistic. As a king's wife, Vashti would have had both personal and family estates to live on and her own circle of nobles and servants to travel with her. She was just barred from the royal court itself. We have evidence of royal wives' estates from Babylonia to Parthia, and stories of nobles like the failed rebel Megabyzus being exiled from court after upsetting the king. The infrastructure existed for Vashti to just quietly go away without losing any official rank.

The actual wording of that verse is also much closer to the realistic next steps taken by the Persian court than most tellings of the story, including the rest of the book. Some have described Esther as presenting a strictly monogamous Persian king. That's not quite right, because it does acknowledge the existence of the king's concubines and the harem. However, it also presents a singular queenship passing from Vashti to Esther. This is inaccurate.

Generally, when discussing the Achaemenids I prefer to use the phrases "royal women" and "royal wives" rather than saying "queen." Not only was there no Achaemenid title for a queen, but it wouldn't really have made sense. Several women at a time met the criteria for our definition of "queen," and they often overlapped. The king could have a first wife, the mother of his heir apparent, a favorite wife, and the could all be different women with more wives waiting in the wings. That was the case for Darius the Great. The only woman with clearly defined superiority above all others was the Queen Mother. Realistically, if a royal wife was dismissed from court, one of the king's other wives would probably receive her position by default, but this aspect of things doesn't factor into Esther's conception of Queenship.

Instead, Esther describe the search for beautiful women across the empire and how they were basically put on display before the king. Similar events have been held in several different cultures from ancient Egypt to Qing China. It's possible the Achaemenids had a similar practice, but there is no direct reference to it outside of Esther. The problem for the biblical story is that this flies in the face of what little we do know about Achaemenid marriage practices, which brings me to:

Queen Esther's Jewishness is not known by her husband the king until a dramatic reveal towards the end of the story. Were mixed royal marriages common/unheard of in the Achaemenid empire?

Unheard of? No. Common? Also no.

Cyrus the Great in particular is noted for taking a Median wife by Ctesias, and Herodotus suggests that either Cyrus or his son Cambyses solicited Pharaoh Amasis for one of his daughters as a royal wife. However, both of these unions come from the context of Greek authors who did not always understand Persian court life and they pale in comparison to the rest of the known Persian royal wives. Every other "queen" in Achaemenid history was Persian herself. On top of that, even Cyrus and Cambyses had Persian wives, and their known children (ie Cambyses, his siblings, and his own miscarried son) were all from those Persian-Persian unions.

The only other time that non-Persian blood was injected into the royal lineage was in 424 BCE, when a disputed succession led to a civil war and Darius II, the son of a Babylonian concubine taking the throne. The events of 424-423 BCE actually featured the children of three different Babylonian concubines from the harem of Artaxerxes I participating in the conflict.