Surviving the Agagites: A postcolonial reading of Esther 8-9

Abstract

From a postcolonial perspective, the Jews in the book of Esther not only resist against and survive the Agagites, they also re-appropriate colonising impulses from their cultural memory. This article argues that the battles in Esth 8-9 contain several appropriations from holy war in the Deuteronomistic History, and, as a result, the said narrative can be identified as written to fit within the trajectory of the Jews' own imperium. This literary intertextuality is underpinned by three expressions of holy-war language and protocol: fear falling on the Jews' enemies, the Jews refraining from plundering, and the postwar hanging of corpses on trees.