Queen Vashti: A 3-Act Story

Vashti “on one foot”:

Vashti was the first wife of King Achashveirosh \ Ahashuerus in Megillat Esther (“the Megillah”) which we read on Purim.

Context: This is the 1879 painting "Vashti Refuses the King's Summons", by the English painter Edwin Long. He was inspired to paint "Oriental" scenes after visiting Egypt and Syria in 1874 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Long).

1. What do you see?

2. What do you think?

3. What do you wonder?

Act 1

Context: This is the very beginning of the Biblical Book of Esther.

1. History (and stories) is not inevitable; people (and authors) make choices. At what points could this part of the story have turned out differently?

2. If you had to guess, how would you describe the king’s party — the mood and/or what was going on there?

3. If you had to guess, how would you describe the queen’s party — the mood and/or what was going on there?

4. Why might Vashti be giving a separate party at all?

Act 2

Context: This is the next part of the story. Note that the text says that Vashti was asked to come wearing her crown, not wearing “only” her crown.

1. At what points could this part of the story have turned out differently?

2. What might the king have been hoping to get by having Vashti come?

3. Why might Vashti have refused?

4. How might Vashti have felt before, during, and after she refused?

Act 3

Context: This is the next and last part of Chapter 1 of the Book of Esther. Note that Vashti is simply deposed, not put to death or banished in the text.

1. At what points could this part of the story have turned out differently?

2. What was Memuchan afraid would happen if Vashti was not banished?

3. How might Vashti have felt leaving the palace?

​​​​​​​4. How might this story be relevant today?

A Musical Take

Context: This is Debbie Friedman’s “Vashti’s Song”. It was released on her 1990 album “Live at the Del” (https://www.discogs.com/master/2840101-Debbie-Friedman-Live-At-The-Del)

This 2019 song "I'm Done Dressing Up for You" is by Alicia Jo Rabins and is part of her "Girls in Trouble" series. Lyrics are here: https://www.girlsintroublemusic.com/songs/im-done-dressing-up/

Appendix A: The full story

Appendix B: Vashti and Esther

Kippah tip to Rachel Petroff Kessler for finding this

Selections from "Vashti and Esther: A Feminist Perspective" by Wendy Amsellem

Although Vashti and Esther never meet, the relationship between them is integral to understanding the events of the Book of Esther. Vashti disappears by the end of the first chapter, but she casts a long shadow over the rest of the book.

As we encounter Vashti in chapter one, we learn the following about her: She is beautiful and headstrong. She throws a good party. She refuses to have her appearances before the king regulated solely by his desires. For this last offense, Vashti pays dearly, losing her crown and incurring perpetual banishment from the king’s presence. At the close of chapter one it is clear that a woman in Ahasuerus’s court would do well to be dutiful and to come before the king as he commands.

By contrast, Esther is presented at first as the perfect foil to Vashti. Whereas Vashti was willful and independent, Esther is passive and submissive...It is no surprise that Ahasuerus loves Esther. She is the model of docility, an exact antidote to Vashti.

In this moment...Esther looks into her mirror and discovers that she does not look quite so different from Vashti after all. She takes matters into her own hands and stands up to both sources of authority. Esther assumes control of Mordechai’s plan, changing and amending as she sees fit. Like Vashti, she will appear before the king only when she decides that the time is right–in this case after three days of fasting. Instead of following Mordechai’s suggestion and simply making her petition, she will throw a series of parties as Vashti did. In order to succeed, Esther realizes that she must take on aspects of the repudiated former queen.

...Purim is a holiday in which we explore and challenge our boundaries. We dress up as other people. Some of us drink to the point where differences become blurred. In the spirit of this holiday and following the legacy of our ancestor Esther, I encourage us to reexamine whom we emulate and from whom we shy away. We may discover as Esther did that we are not so different from those whom we fear and that the most important lessons can be learned from the unlikeliest of teachers.

Appendix C: Classical Midrashim

For an excellent examination of the midrashim about Vashti, see this article: https://www.thetorah.com/article/ahasuerus-and-vashti-the-story-megillat-esther-does-not-tell-you

Here's another recounting of the midrashim about Vashti, this time comparing the ones from the rabbis in the Land of Israel, which tended to view Vashti favorably, with the ones from the rabbis in Babylonia, which tended to view Vashti unfavorably: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/vashti-midrash-and-aggadah

Appendix D: A Modern Midrash

Defending Vashti

By DR. ANNE LAPIDUS LERNERMarch 14, 2014, 4:00 am

When the descendants of noble Queen Vashti approached me to undertake her defense, I was, frankly, dubious about the prospects. After all, the eyewitnesses, unreliable as their DUI testimony may have been, have long since left the scene, and no DNA evidence survives. Further, I have a reputation as the Alan Dershowitz of lost causes of historic proportions to maintain.

Yet, as they continued to importune me, the merits of the case, the dimensions of this miscarriage of justice, and of my potential fee became apparent. Despite the 2,500 years that have elapsed, justice must be served, along with the rest of the menu.

First, some context for those of you who were not alive during the glorious reign of Queen Vashti. Unfortunately, due to the miscarriage of justice and the “disappearance” of the queen, the only extant record of her story is the one in that self-aggrandizing Jewish scroll of Esther, which hardly can be trusted as an accurate record.

Vashti is reputed to have been the daughter of Belshazzar, the last king of Babylon, whose final days in about 550 B.C.E. were recorded, alas, only in that Jewish book of Daniel. How can we give it credence when it speaks in forked languages? Further, Rembrandt, whose pictorial representation “Belshazzar’s Feast” was painted in 1635, was clearly not present.

Unlike her successor, that well-oiled Jewish girl Esther, Vashti was of royal lineage. I am sure that I don’t need to tell you that the story about the beauty contest must have been composed by one of Ahasuerus’s drunken guests. Queens were – and are – chosen for their political usefulness, not for their prowess, you will excuse me, between the sheets. For that, in those glorious days, there were harems.

The rabbis, in a flight of imagination that is our only record, proposed that on the night Belshazzar was killed Cyrus the Persian and Darius the Mede were guests at his table – an improbable troika given that they were enemies. The candelabrum fell, killing Belshazzar. In the ensuing chaos in the palace, Darius was named to succeed Belshazzar and sat on his royal chair. Vashti, Belshazzar’s young daughter, confused by the palatial pandemonium, sought comfort from her father. In the dark she did not realize that the lap on the royal chair belonged to Darius. This was no lap dance. Taking pity on his orphaned lap lady, Darius moved her from the lap of fortune to marriage to his son Ahasuerus, aka Xerxes.

A slightly more credible story, but, I again warn you, only rabbinic in origin, maintains that Ahasuerus, who was in charge of the royal stables, acquired regal status by marrying the princess. Which laps were involved here is somewhat obscure.

This fictional reconstruction goes some distance in explaining the remarkable disparity between this unlikely king and his blameless queen. As the book of Esther attests: “on the seventh day, when the king was merry with wine” – in other words, completely soused. Public inebriety is not consonant with royalty.

Before moving on to the charges against Vashti, allow me also to point out that this royal match could have no spark. According to those rabbis, when the prophet Isaiah said “instead of the nettle, the myrtle shall rise” he was predicting that Vashti would be dethroned to make way for Esther, whose Hebrew name, Hadassah, means myrtle. Vashti was the “sacrificial queen,” whose sole purpose was to provide an excuse for that “beauty contest.” Of course, that “prophecy” of Isaiah was made after the putative date of the occurrences recounted in the Esther scroll, augmenting its reliability.

CHARGES:
Disobedience

The first charge is that Vashti disobeyed her husband when he ordered her to come, wearing her crown, into the binge-drinking party he was hosting. This charge is groundless. What respectable woman would enter such a scene wearing only her crown? Besides, the custom was that no respectable woman, even completely dressed, would enter the scene of such debauchery. The only women whose business it might have been to be present were, shall we say, in business in the world’s oldest profession.

Some rabbinic traditions appear to have had access to the transcript of the recorded messages that flew between the drunken commoner king and his lucid royal queen. Here is the transcription.

When Ahasuerus sent his important ministers, some of whom were eunuchs, to bring Vashti, she gave her husband the ritually mandated three opportunities to withdraw his demand.

First she told him: “If they see me and think me beautiful, they will want to lie with me, and they will kill you. And if they see me and think me ugly, you will be disgraced because of me.” Appealing to logic, she tries to convince him that, as we say to our children, actions have consequences.

Vashti’s second attempt was: “You were my father’s stable steward, accustomed to having naked harlots come before you. Now that you have become king, you have not mended your degraded ways!”

Although she addresses his sense of honor and self-respect, demanding that he act as a king should, she also reminds him that he did not come into this high office on his merit, but on hers. Since it is her authority he wields he cannot force her to act against her will

There is an unexplained chai – an 18-minute – gap in the recording here. We can only imagine what might have been erased.

Finally she told him: “You want me to come naked. Even my father, when he judged litigants in a trial, would not judge them when they were naked.” He would do well to emulate her father.

Clearly we have ample evidence that Vashti has the wisdom to appeal to Ahasuerus using multiple intelligences. Ahasuerus, on the other hand, acts rashly, without thinking even one step ahead. She should be vindicated and held up as a paragon of virtue, rather than punished.

CHARGES:
Fomenting Rebellion

Likewise the charge that Vashti’s behavior was contagious, modeling uxorial disobedience that would be emulated by wives everywhere in the 127 provinces of the Persian Empire, is baseless. The only reason that anyone outside the palace learned of this domestic contretemps is that the king stupidly publicized it. Vashti did not control the imperial records, the press, the web, or even Wikileaks.

Let us recall that the king’s idiotic mis-advisers were eunuchs. What could they know of the way that power is shared in marriage? I hate to admit it, but those rabbis had a much better perspective on domestic tranquility. They argue that Ahasuerus was stupid to think that a man can impose his will upon his wife: “If a man wants to eat lentils and his wife wants to eat beans, can he force her? Surely she does as she likes.”

CHARGES:
Mistreating workers

The Jews, who later became notorious as supporters of liberal – some might even say socialist – causes, indicated their support of labor as early as the rabbinic period. Supporting labor is fine, as long as it does not become an excuse for maligning management or raising taxes on the rich. In this case spurious charges were drummed up against Vashti, particularly by those rabbis in Babylonia who had to show that Jews were superior to the local population.

They charged that Vashti had Jewish girls work naked, so being ordered to appear naked herself was, one might say, tit-for-tat, or for tit. Another tit-for-t?t claims that her punishment came on the seventh day of the feasting because she forced Jewish girls to work on their seventh day – Shabbat.

Those rabbis even go so far as to suggest that she refused to appear naked because she suffered from leprosy. Their over-active imaginations fantasized that the angel Gabriel came and attached a tail to her, making her unwilling to appear. That’s clearly ridiculous, as it is well known that Ahasuerus, when he finally came to, looked all over the palace for his beloved Vashti, having no memory that she had been excised.

In a more valid midrashic depiction, when Ahasuerus grew sober, he regretted what he had done. He recalled Vashti and her proper behavior, as well as how he had improperly condemned her.

Yet another tradition has Ahasuerus inquiring after his wife when the effects of his intoxication wore off. He was told: “You killed her!” “Why?” “You said for her to come before you naked and she did not come.” He admitted to them: “I did not act nicely. And who counseled me to kill her?” They told him: “The seven ministers of Persia and Media.” He immediately killed them. Consequently, the seven eunuchs are not mentioned again in the Book of Esther.

In fact, Ahasuerus regretted getting rid of Vashti so much that he kept pictures of her above his bed, which he would look at any time he had a woman there, which was generally at least once a day. Vashti continued to reign in his bedroom until he met that commoner Esther, whose pictures went up as Vashti’s were torn down.

SUMMATION:

By now it should be clear to you that Vashti is the blameless victim of this story. While I here have been arguing for an official reversal of her punishment and the restoration of her portrait to the gallery of the queens and kings of the Persians, whatever you decide is on some level irrelevant. After all, Vashti was not a happy queen. She was not comfortable with the licentiousness of the palace scene. All she wanted was some quiet.

In those ancient times, she could not achieve her goal by leaning in. She leaned out and plotted her own escape from the palace. She took her crown and enough jewelry with her to live happily ever after in a quiet corner of a neighboring kingdom, surrounded by her beloved and caring children and staff.

https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/defending-vashti/

Appendix E: Esther vs. Vashti

Breaking Free of the Esther/Vashti Complex

Alan Robert Ginsberg

March 20, 2019

Call it the “Esther/Vashti Complex” — the perennial Purim impulse to define Esther and Vashti against each other as foils, opposites, rivals, or enemies.

They were none of these. This false dichotomy has been superimposed on the narrative, enduring through the ages, reducing the women to two-dimensional figures, robbing them of the dignity of human complexity. It obscures a story of female empowerment behind a mask of misogyny.

For 25 centuries, scholars, rabbis and other thinkers have tried to pit two courageous women against each other, depicting Vashti as wicked and Esther as angelic, venerating Esther by vilifying Vashti.

But Harriet Beecher Stowe praised Vashti as early as 1878 for standing up for women’s rights, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton applauded Vashti’s defiant resistance in 1898. In recent decades it has become increasingly fashionable to vindicate Vashti and even to devalue Esther with faint praise or outright scorn. “Vashti fights for her modesty and her honor, while our heroine Esther is willing to work through the bedroom,” writes Rabbi Ruhama Weiss. Isabel Kaplan derides Esther for having “slept her way to the top.” Scriptural slut-shaming seems particularly ill-advised and retrograde.

Not only were Esther and Vashti never adversaries, there is historical evidence to suggest they were the same woman. The next time you thumb through ancient secular sources such as “The Histories” by Herodotus or Plato’s account of Socrates’ dialogue with Alcibiades, you’ll notice they name only one woman, Amestris, as the wife of Xerxes, the Persian king identified with Ahasuerus.

Drop the “V” from Vashti and the “Am” from Amestris, and it’s not much of a stretch from the remaining “ashti” and “estris” to “Esther.” Etymologies reaching back to ancient Greek, Persian, Babylonian and Hebrew are complex and uncertain at best. Esther derives from Ishtar, a Greek goddess and “star.” Vashti and Amestris also share roots.

Esther and Vashti contend with the same husband, the same patriarchal authority. They never appear together, or even at the same time. For interpretive purposes, we may conclude that they were two women of valor. Or one.

Ahasuerus throws a party, a six-month government shutdown to energize his base. Wine is served in vessels of gold. The décor is garish.

Later, the king convenes a smaller party of cronies, patrons, sycophants and generals while Queen Vashti fêtes the real housewives of Shushan’s noblest families.

The king orders Vashti to abandon her female posse and her dignity, and dance naked in front of the men. Vashti refuses.

Ahasuerus can have Vashti brought to him by force. But he needs her to appear voluntarily so he can seem like a benevolent husband with a loving, compliant wife. Vashti’s refusal shatters the illusion.

Ahasuerus spins his personal embarrassment as a political question. He asks his advisers what to do. Vashti’s defiance — a courageous declaration of self-ownership — terrifies the king’s men. They fear that Vashti’s chutzpah will inspire their wives to rebel and disobey.

Vashti is banished. Details are sketchy. Perhaps she is simply relegated to the king’s harem, hidden from the public and banned from the royal bedroom.

Ahasuerus is left embarrassed and alone.

A search for Vashti’s replacement commences with young women commanded to compete for the role, sequestered in the palace, bathed in frankincense and myrrh. Each woman spends a night on the king’s casting couch. There can be only one leading lady. After, uh, auditioning them all, the king will anoint his favorite.

This process is described as a beauty contest. The winner will wear the royal crown that provided no honor and no protection to Vashti. These women will be raped and enslaved as concubines. (How strenuously we must avert our attention from these sordid details to maintain the fairy-tale illusions we associate with this happy holiday.)

Esther is conscripted into this beauty contest by her cousin and guardian Mordecai. She is the orphaned daughter of his uncle. Having raised Esther from childhood, Mordecai offers her to the king. This act is troubling, to put it mildly. [Ed. Note - This is factually incorrect -- in Esther Chapter 2, the royal officers are told to take all the young woman and they take Esther. There is not a word about Mordechai urging her to participate or offering her. I'm all for not whitewashing things for adults, but this is just a factual error. - DS]

But Esther is a strategic thinker. She enters the contest without protest. Esther gives Ahasuerus what Vashti refused him — in private, not in front of an audience. What she chooses to reveal is superficial. She conceals her Jewish identity.

The king requires Esther to agree to remain obedient, an ironic legacy of Vashti’s refusal. Esther formally consents. Perhaps this is a sadder but wiser Vashti, transformed into the savvy Esther, pursuing a new strategy.

Ahasuerus decrees a festival to honor the new queen. He never asks Esther to dance. To win popularity, he cuts taxes.

Meanwhile, Haman wants the world to bow to him. Mordecai won’t bow. And when Mordecai discovers a plot to assassinate the king, he sends a warning through Esther, earning the king’s gratitude and Haman’s wrath. Haman then plans to kill all the Jews. [ Ed. Note - another factual error -- Mordechai sends warning through Esther at the end of Chapter 2, Haman doesn't appear until Chapter 3. Haman plans to kill all the Jews because Mordechai won't bow down to him, not because Mordechai reported the assassination plot. - DS]

Mordecai wants Esther to get the king to prevent the pogrom. But even the queen may not visit the king unless he summons her. Aware of what happened to Vashti, Esther hesitates to approach the erratic king. Mordecai argues that self-preservation and Jewish solidarity compel her to act.

So, Esther presents herself to the king. He invites her to approach and kiss his scepter. She complies. We pretend not to understand. The visit is conjugal. It’s been a month since husband and wife last saw each other.

As it turns out, the king is delighted that his wife took the initiative. The now-uxorious Ahasuerus protects Esther as he failed to protect Vashti. Esther has won a victory on the metaphorical battlefield where Vashti fell.

Haman is then hung from the gallows he built for Mordecai. Enabled by Esther, the Jews defend their lives.

Esther takes the baton of female empowerment passed by Vashti. Or, if you prefer, Vashti reemerges as Esther. The Jewish people get a seat at the table of power. The tradition of matrilineal descent in intermarriage affords Esther the prospect of bearing children who will be Jewish Persian royalty.

On Purim we drink wine until we cannot tell the difference between Mordecai and Haman. Better to drink wine until we cannot tell the difference between Esther and Vashti, and break free of the Esther/Vashti Complex.

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/analysis/295455/breaking-free-of-the-esther-vashti-complex/