Is the Book of Esther a Holy Book?

This week, Daf Yomi readers began a new tractate, Megilla, which deals with the holiday of Purim—the day on which we read the Megilla or Scroll of Esther. And in Megillat 7a, we learned a surprising fact about that scroll: “Rav Yehuda said that Shmuel said: The book of Esther does not render the hands ritually impure.” All the other books of the Bible transmit tumah, ritual impurity, to those who touch them: As the Koren Talmud explains, the sages instituted this rule in order to discourage people from handling the biblical books too casually. Why doesn’t the Book of Esther follow this pattern? “Is this to say,” the Gemara asks, “that Shmuel maintains that the book of Esther was not stated with the inspiration of the Divine Spirit?”

The rabbis go on to debate the question, and they finally decide that Esther was indeed divinely inspired. But their uncertainty about this is telling, and it points to the anomalous nature of the Book of Esther in the Bible. The best way to gauge its uniqueness is that Esther is the only biblical book that never mentions the name of God—which itself may be a reason why it doesn’t transmit tumah. The story of how Mordecai and Esther foil the evil plot of Haman is told entirely in human terms; it is full of coincidences that never quite rise to the status of miracles. Perhaps it was divine providence that placed Esther on the throne of Persia, where she could intervene to save the Jews; perhaps God ensured that Mordecai was in the right place to overhear the plot against Ahasuerus; perhaps God gave the king insomnia one night so that he could have the story of Mordecai’s good deed read to him.

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