MORDECAI
591
MORDECAI
■ 5, G. Most interpreters, indeed, have understood this passage as stating that IMordecai himself was taken captive with Jehoiachin. But that any one who liad been taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar in the eighth year of liis reign should be vizier after the twelfth year of any Persian king among the successors of Cyrus is not very easy to believe. Besides, too, the difficulty of supposing tlie ordinary laws of human life to be sus- pended in the case of any person mentioned in Script- ure, when the sacred history gives no such intimation, there is a peculiar defiance of probability in the suppo- sition that the cousin-german of the youthful Esther, her father's brother's son, should be of an age ranging from 90 to 170 years at the time that she was chosen to be queen on account of her youth and beauty. But not only is this interpretation of Esth. ii, 5, G excluded by chronology, but the rules of grammatical propriety equally point out, not Mordecai, but Kish, as being the person who was taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar at the time when Jehoiachin was carried away. Because, if it had been intended to speak of Mordecai as led cap- tive, the ambiguity would easily have been avoided hy either placing the clause (1^5."! "'^iX, etc., immediately after nTiSil yJVlJa, and then adding his name and genealogy, 'h i^'d^, or else by writing Nini. instead of "idX at the beginning of ver. G, Again, as the sen- tence stands, the distribution of the copulative 1. dis- tinctly connects the sentence 'i2i< "^fl'l'l in ver. 7 with iT^n in ver. 5, showing that three things are predicated of Mordecai : (1) that he lived in Shushan ; (2) that his name was Mordecai, son of Jair, son of Shimei, son of Kish the Benjamite, who was taken captive with Je- hoiachin ; (3) that he brought up Esther. This gene- alogy does, then, fix with great certainty the age of Mordecai. He was great-grandson of a contemporary of Jehoiachin. Now four generations cover 120 years — and 120 years from B.C. 598 brings us to B.C. 479, i. e. to the sixth year of the reign of Xerxes; thus confirm- ing with singular force the arguments which led to the conclusion that Ahasuerus is Xerxes. See Ahasuerus. This carrying back of the genealogy of a captive to the time of the captivity has an obvious propriety, as con- necting the captives with the family record preserved in the public genealogies before the captivity, just as an American would be likely to carry up his pedigree to the ancestor who emigrated from England (see Ber- theau, Exer/. Ilandb. ad loc). Furthermore, it would seem entirely possible (though it cannot be certainl)' proved) that the Jlordecai mentioned in the duplicate passage, Ezra ii, 2 ; Neh. vii, 7, as one of the leaders of the captives who returned from time to time from Bab- ylon to Judiea [see Ezra], was the same as Mordecai of the book of Esther. It is not unlikely that on the death of Xerxes, or possibly during his lifetime, he may have obtained leave to lead back such Jews as were willing to accompany him, and that he did so. His age need not have exceeded fifty or sixty years, and his character points him out as likely to lead his country- men back from exile if be had the opportunity. The name JNIordecai not occurring elsewhere makes this supposition the more probable. We may add that in a passage of Josephus (Anf. xi, 4, 9), which gives an ac- count of troubles excited by the Samaritans against the Jews about that time, as they were rebuilding the Temple, the names of Ananias and Mordecai (MapSo- Xniof) are given along with that of Zerubbabel as am- bassadors from the Jews to king Darius.
2. As regards Mordecai's place in profane history, the domestic annals of the reign of Xerxes are so scanty that it would not surprise us to find no mention of this Jew. But there is a person named by Ctesias, who probably saw the very chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia referred to in Esth. x, 2, and whose name and character present some points of resemblance with Mordecai, viz. Matacas or Natacas (as the name
is variously written), described by him as Xcrxes's chief favorite, and the most powerfid of them all. His brief notice of him in these words, yixtappivwv vs n'tyi- (TTOv ycvvciTO Nara/cac, is in exact agreement with the description of Mordecai (Esth. ix, 4 ; x, 2, 3). He fur- ther relates of him that when Xerxes, after his return from Greece, had commissioned Megabyzus to go and plunder the temple of Apollo at Deljihi (perhaps, rath- er, the temple of Apollo Didymajus, near Miletus, which was destroyeil by Xerxes after his return, Strabo, xiv, cap. 1, § 5), upon his refusal, he sent Matacas the eu- nuch to insult the god and to plunder his property; which Matacas did, and returned to Xerxes. It is ob- vious how grateful to the feelings of a Jew, such as Mordecai was, would be a commission to desecrate and spoil a heathen temple. There is also much probability in the selection of a Jew to be his prime minister by a monarch of such decided iconoclastic propensities as Xerxes is known to have had (Prideaux, Connect, i, 231-233). Xerxes would doubtless see much analogy between the Magian tenets of which he was so zeal- ous a patron and those of the Jews' religion; just as Pliny actually reckons Moses (whom he couples with Jannes) among the leaders of the Magian sect, in the very same passage in which he relates that Osthanes the Magian author and heresiarch accompanied Xerxes in his Greek expedition, and widely diffused the Ma- gian doctrines (lib. xxx, cap. 1, § 2); and in § 4 he seems to identify Christianity also with Magic. From the context it appears highly probable that this no- tice of jNIoses and of Jannes may be derived from the work of Osthanes, and, if so, the probable intercourse of Osthanes with Slordecai would readily account for his mention of them. The point, however, here in- sisted upon is that the known hatred of Xerxes to idol- worship makes his selection of a Jew for his prime min- ister very probable, and that there are strong points of resemblance in what is thus related of Matacas and what ^ve know from Scripture of Mordecai. Again, that Mordecai was, what Matacas is related to have been, a eunuch, seems not improbable from his having neither wife nor child, from his bringing up his cousin Esther in his own house (to account for this, the Tar- gum says that he was seventy-five years old), from his situation in the king's gate, from his access to the court of the women, and from his being raised to the highest post of power by the king, which we know from Persian history was so often the case with the king's eunuchs. With these points of agreement between them, there is sufhcient resemblance in their names to add additional probability to the supposition of their identity. The most plausible etymology usually given for the name Mordecai is that favored by Gesenius, who connects it with Merodach the Babylonian idol (called Mardok in the cuneifc«-m inscriptions), and which appears in the names Mesessi-Mordacus, Sisi-Mordachus, in nearty the same form as in the Greek, Mapoox«i'of- But it is highly improbable that the name of a Babylonian idol should have been given to him under the Persian dy- nasty (Rawlinson llferod. i, 270] points out Layard's conclusion [Nin. ii, 441], that the Persians adopted gen- erally the Assyrian religion as " quite a mistake"), and it is equally improbable that Mordecai should have been taken into the king's service before the commence- ment of the Persian dynasty. If, then, we suppose the original form of the name to have been Matacai, it would easily in the Chaldee orthography become Mor- decai, just as XO-13 is for Xas, '^'^'2y:J for ::30, pd^"l'l for p'^^'l, etc. In the Targum of Esther he is said to be called Mordecai because he was like X'l'^ia? S^I'S'l, " to pure myrrh."