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Rabbinic tradition in tractate Megillah interprets the story of Esther to say she was married to Mordecai, following a tradition found in the Greek Septuagint of Esther and not the Hebrew original.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
LXX Esther 2:7
Septuagint
5 Now there was a Judean in the city of Susa whose name was Mordecai, who was the son of Jair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish, from the tribe of Benjamin. 6 He was a captive from Jerusalem, which Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had captured. 7 And he had a foster child, the daughter of Abihail, the brother of his father, and her name was Esther. Now when her parents died, he raised her for himself as a wife; and the maiden was beautiful.
Megillah 13a
Babylonian Talmud
Rabbinic
The verse states: “And when her father and mother were dead, Mordecai took her for his own daughter” (Esther 2:7). A tanna taught a baraita in the name of Rabbi Meir: Do not read the verse literally as for a daughter [bat], but rather read it as for a home [bayit]. This indicates that Mordecai took Esther to be his wife. And so it states: “But the poor man had nothing, except one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and reared: And it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his bread, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was like a daughter [kevat] to him” (II Samuel 12:3). The Gemara questions: Because it lay in his bosom, it “was like a daughter to him”? Rather, the parable in II Samuel referenced the illicit taking of another’s wife, and the phrase should be read: Like a home [bayit] to him, i.e., a wife. So too, here, Mordecai took her for a home, i.e., a wife.
Date: 450-550 C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
… Thus Esther’s concern for dietary laws in Addition C 27–28 should be compared with the Babylonian Talmud Megillah 13a, Targum Rishon, and Targum Sheni 2:20. See B. Grossfeld, The Two Targums of Esther: Translated with Apparatus and Notes (The Aramaic Bible, Vol. 18), Collegeville 1991. For the Septuagint Esther 2:7 ‘he trained her for himself as a wife’ (the Masoretic Text ‘Mordecai adopted her as his own daughter’) compare the Babylonian Talmud Megillah 13a ‘A Tanna taught in the name of Rabbi Meir: Read not “for a daughter” [le-bat], but “for a house” [le-bayit] ’. For a different view on the relation between the Septuagint and the Midrash, see M. Zipor, ‘When Midrash Met Septuagint: The Case of Esther 2, 7’, Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 118 (2006), 82–92. …
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