Daniel, Esther, and the whole lot of Hebrew exiles were on my mind this summer as I made my way through Edward Slingerland’s Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. Slingerland makes a compelling and entertaining argument that large-scale human civilization as we know it was made possible by alcohol.
Drawing on research from history, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and other disciplines, he argues that getting drunk has enabled human cooperation and creativity (the two keys to human success) at the interpersonal, tribal, and even imperial scales. He thinks the ability to brew alcohol in mass quantities is what motivated humans to abandon hunting and gathering in favor of settled agriculture. The wheels of the social evolutionary process were, and still are, lubricated by wine and beer.
This book is a little outside my ordinary wheelhouse. (Thanks to my friend Matt Tebbe for the recommendation.) And while the thesis is interesting on its own, it also got me thinking about how to make sense of scenes from the book of Esther, where a lot of the action happens while people are getting drunk.
In Vino Veritas
The Book of Esther follows the story of a Jewish woman, who becomes queen to King Xerxes (aka King Ahasuerus) and saves the Jewish population in Persia from genocide. Banquets—or “drinking parties”—feature prominently in the story (mentioned 14 times). Evidently this is because drinking is how the Persian government got work done.
The Greek historian Herodotus, who lived around the time the events in the Book of Esther took place, had this to say about the role of booze in Persian diplomacy:
"If an important decision is to be made, [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk." (Herodotus, Histories 1:133)
If Slingerland’s survey of alcohol use through the ages is accurate, this Persian practice is unremarkable. He makes the case that “from ancient China to ancient Greece to Oceania, no negotiation was ever concluded, no treaty ever signed, without copious quantities of chemical intoxicants" (Slingerland, 178).
The Latin phrase in vino veritas (“in wine there is truth”) summarizes the logic at work here. Before I form a treaty or sign a contract with you, I want to know you’re linking fortunes with me in good faith. Concealing your motives and faking fealty requires a fair amount of concerted cognitive effort. That means, if "you want to make it harder for liars to lie,” Slingerland explains,
one promising approach would be to exploit this weakness [i.e., the cognitive control required to lie] by down-regulating their cognitive control. ... Bonus points if you can do it in a way that is actually pleasurable and also makes people happy and more focused on those around them" (129).
In other words, getting a potential business partner or political ally plastered is a good way to discern their motives and test their loyalty. “In wine there is truth.” Or so the logic goes.
Slingerland identifies a few other ways alcohol can serve a sovereign’s interests. A couple are illustrated in the book of Esther.
Wine and Social Cohesion
Slingerland notes a “connection between large-scale, centralized production of alcohol and the beginnings of political and ideological unity” in regions as far apart as China and the Andes.
And perhaps in Persia.
After all, Esther’s story opens on a six-month-long display of wealth, during which King Xerxes wined and dined dignitaries from the 127 provinces he ruled "from India to Cush” (1:3-4). It’s not hard to imagine that the purpose of this drinking was to forge “political and ideological unity.” And it may have worked. Surely someone in attendance, who initially considered Xerxes a tyrant, changed his mind after several months of imbibing: I’m beginning to like this guy!
This political bender ended with a week-long populist banquet (“drinking party”) for all the residents of Susa, "from the least to the greatest" (1:5). The "royal wine was abundant," and everyone was invited to drink as much as they wanted (1:7-8). This is quite an arrangement for the typical day laborer in attendance. It’s a boon for Xerxes, too, if his splashing out for a week boosts the morale of his largely uncompensated labor force. Again, this use of alcohol is not uncommon, either in the past or the present. Slingerland writes:
To this day, throughout the world, large communal projects that rely upon unpaid labor, like constructing buildings or maintaining canals or irrigation channels, typically compensate the workers with massive, alcohol-heavy banquets or feasts funded by central authorities or local patrons. (153)
Which is all to say that we may be inclined to assume that the first few verses of Esther describe a sordid scene of pagan decadence. And maybe they do. But they may also depict a standard exercise in ancient political maneuvering. “In pre-industrial societies, facilitating drinking on the job is the only way to get the job done.”
Wine and Big Decisions
On the final day of festivities, King Xerxes sent a message to his queen, Vashti, who was hosting her own party “for the women” (1:9). Vashti was “lovely to look at” (1:11), and Xerxes wanted her to come do a little turn on the catwalk for him and his drunk friends.
She refused. (Good for her.)
Xerxes was furious. So he called together a group of “experts in matters of law and justice”—also presumably quite drunk—and asked them what he should do about it. They concluded that Vashti had done wrong by ignoring the king’s command. What’s more, they worried her example would embolden other women to disobey their husbands. So they recommended that Vashti be replaced as queen “by someone else who is better than she” (1:19) and that all the women in the kingdom should be commanded to obey their husbands.
The relevant point here is that Xerxes appears to have followed the pattern Herodotus describes above and decided how to handle the matter of Vashti while drunk. Later, when he reflected on the situation while sober, he didn’t express regret. He simply accepted while sober the decision he made while drunk (2:1).
Wine and a Foiled Genocide
Fast forward and Esther has replaced Vashti. Esther is a Jew, but Xerxes doesn’t know that. Haman, one of Xerxes’s nobles, has coordinated a pogrom to eliminate the Jews in the kingdom (3:13), and Xerxes has given the plan his blessing (3:8-9). Esther makes a counter plan to leverage her proximity to Xerxes to save her people and herself. As with everything else in the book so far, the plan involves a couple of “drinking parties.”
Esther invites Xerxes and Haman to a drinking party she arranged. The text goes out of its way to note that Xerxes asks Esther for her petition “as they were drinking wine" (5:6). It’s as if the business of the meeting can’t begin until the wine is flowing. Esther is not plying Xerxes with drink. Xerxes starts drinking before he starts discussing matters of state. He asks Esther, “Now what is your petition? … Even up to half the kingdom, it will be granted.”
She asks only for another “drinking party” the next night. Xerxes is happy to oblige. Haman is thrilled. He goes home in high spirits and tells his wife, “I’m the only person Queen Esther invited to accompany the king to the banquet she gave. And she has invited me along with the king tomorrow” (5:12). Haman is enjoying life inside the inner circle.
The next night, "as they were drinking wine” again, Xerxes asks Esther what favor he can do for her. That’s when she tells him there is a plot to exterminate her people—a plot instigated by none other than “this vile Haman” across the table from her (7:6). In vino veritas indeed. Xerxes, enraged, has Haman executed. The Jewish people are saved.
What Difference Does All the Drinking Make?
The book of Esther illustrates several of the functions Edward Slingerland attributes to alcohol in the development of human civilization: political and ideological alignment, rewarding the working class, and lubricating important decisions. That’s pretty interesting all by itself. In addition to being interesting, it may help us understand why Esther plans two “drinking parties” for Xerxes and Haman at the story’s climax.
The text doesn’t tell us Esther’s strategy. We’re left to speculate about why she requests not one but two banquets. As Randy Richards and I say in Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, when all the relevant information isn’t made explicit in a passage, we fill in gaps with our own unconscious assumptions (“what goes without being said” for us). In the case of Esther, I wonder if what often goes without being said is what can be expected of a woman.
It’s not uncommon to find commentators who reason as follows:
Esther was playing the king like a trophy fish, taking her time and not rushing to reel him into her net. She was carefully maneuvering him into a position where he would be virtually obligated to do whatever she asked, without his even being aware that he had been hooked. (Iain M. Duguid, Esther and Ruth)
The italicized words above connote manipulation. Esther’s strategy was to lure Xerxes into a trap from which he couldn’t escape. She did this by leveraging her feminine wiles. She was “a study in meekness, an attribute she knew the king valued in women.” She worked her plan with “patience, care, and cunning,” playing the virtuous woman while manipulating the situation to her gain.
Other commentators suggest, similarly, that Esther’s plan was to exploit Xerxes’ quick temper and weakness for alcohol by getting him drunk and then triggering his rage.
These explanations strike me as possibly relying on stereotypes about what can be expected of a woman. A woman can be expected to overcome a man not through careful diplomacy but through emotional manipulation of one sort or another. The classic femme fatale. Esther is credited with cunning and creativity but her craft is relegated to interpersonal relationships, not matters of state.
If Slingerland and Herodotus are right about the role alcohol played in statecraft in Persia, then it’s possible Esther wasn’t simply leveraging her looks and tugging at the pagan king’s heart strings. Perhaps she knew the king made important decisions during “drinking parties” and so she asks for a drinking party—because she had a very important decision to propose. Instead of being manipulative, she’s being entirely transparent. She doesn’t simply have a personal request to make. She has a matter of state to discuss. And now Xerxes knows it. He waits until he starts drinking to start discussing—because that’s how they conducted business. Strange as it may seem to us to wait until you’re inebriated to make big decisions, it may have been their custom to do just that. I like to imagine that Esther is using her somewhat limited agency to pull the levers of governance wisely and carefully.
In my mind this possibility shifts the tone of Esther’s actions. She’s acting subtlety but not engaging in subterfuge. Instead of manipulating male emotions, she is masterfully navigating social norms. She knows how the sausage is made, and she’s getting her hands dirty. This makes her a compelling vision of faithfulness for those who are trying to be promised-land people in strange lands. It takes courage, subtlety, and wisdom to remain faithful in hostile territory.