Such A Time As This

First Chapter of a Handwritten Scroll of the Book of Esther with Jad (Pointer), Photo by Chefallen (CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

“ ‘For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise…from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?’ ” (Esther 4:14).

This year the Jewish holiday of Purim begins Wednesday evening March 7. For those of you who may not know, Purim celebrates the deliverance of the Jews from destruction in ancient Persia (now northwest Iran, and neighboring areas). That fact is being twisted into a lie on a grand scale.  The parallels are all too clear.

According to the Bible, King Xerxes (Ahasuerus) permitted the Jews to defend themselves against the attacks authorized by an earlier mandate that they be wholly annihilated. The Bible records that this defense by the Jews resulted in the deaths of some 75,000 enemy combatants. It was through the intervention of Esther, Xerxes’ courageous Jewish queen, that he relented. The queen’s cousin, Mordecai, had prompted her to act with the words quoted above.

Archaeologic evidence from the era confirms much of the background to the Bible story, including the existence of King Xerxes of whom the Greek historian Herodotus writes. Longstanding tradition places the tomb of Esther and Mordecai in the city of Hamadan.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not pleased by this truth, so is doing his best to eradicate it.

The tomb has been downgraded from its long held classification as a holy place, and oversight transferred to the state religious-endowments authority. The location is now described as an illustration of Israeli imperialism. Unbelievably, the tomb has been converted to a “Holocaust memorial” to the Iranian “victims” of Esther and Mordechai!?  Iran has renamed Purim a Jewish “Festival of the Massacre of the Iranians.” Children are warned to “beware the crimes of the Jews.”

In the ultimate irony, the sole evidence for battle statistics, thus far, remains the Bible.

This is revisionism with a vengeance.  Apparently, history – like truth these days – is in the eye of the beholder. If only Ahmadinejad were the sole madman out there.

READERS CAN FIND MY VIEWS ON ABUSE AND ABUSE-RELATED ISSUES AT ANNA WALDHERR A Voice Reclaimed, Surviving Child Abuse  http://www.avoicereclaimed.com