Mordecai

• The name "mordokhay" (Mordecai), is found 58 times in the book of , and in two other similar verses in the Bible: one in the book of Ezra, and the second in the book of Nehemiah:
  "elle beney hammedina ha'olim mishshevi haggola asher hegla nevukadnettsar melekh bavel wayyashuvu liyrushalaim weliyhuda ish le'iro: haba'im im zerubavel yeshu'a nehemya azarya ra'amya nahamani morddokhai bilshan misperet bigway nehum ba'ana" (These are the persons of the province, who went up out of the captivity, of the exile whom Nebukhadnezzar the King of Babylon had carried away, and came back to Jerusalem and to Judea, everyone to his city, who came with Zerubbavel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, 'Azarya, Ra'amya, Nahamani, Mordecai, Bilsham, Misperet, Bigvay, Nehum, Ba'ana.)(Ezr. 2:1-2, Neh. 7:6-7).
• Thus, in these verses a person named was one of the people who returned from Babylonian exile in time of Ezra (Ezra had a function of advisor at the court of Artaxerxes I [465-424]).
• The fact that this name is mentioned in this list, proves that he must have been an important figure.
• Chronologically, he may be the same as mentioned in the .
• In the Mishna the name of is mentioned twice;
  First in Pirke Avoth (chap. 6 m. 6ý) where a verse of the is cited:
  
  Thus you learn, that whoever conveys a teaching in name of its author, brings deliverance to the world, as is written (Est. 2:22) "and Esther told the king thereof in Mordecai's name".
  Secondly in Sheqalim (chap. 5 m. 1)
  These are the appointees who were in the Temple:..................Petahyah over the bird offering; Petahyah is Mordecai. Why was he called Petahyah? For he could open up matters and expound them and knew seventy languages.
• It is clear that this must be the same Mordecai as the of the , because "wrote these things, and sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces of the King Ahasuerus, both near and far" (Est. 9:20); knowlege of numerous languages is required for this.
• The name Mordecai is actually a variation of the name of the city god of Babylon ; this being only one of the many written forms of the name "Marduk" in Cuneiform.
• In addition to , we find in the above list other non-Hebrew names: "zerubavel" from Babylonian: ze-er bab-el (offspring of Babel), "bilshan" from Babylonian: be-el-shu-nu (their lord).
• The Jews in Babylonian exile not only changed the names of their months and the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet, as mentioned in lesson three, but even adopted foreign names.

• Now we shall discuss this Babylonian city god, Marduk:

Marduk

The Sumerians developed municipal Kingdoms where the town gods were divine kings; the ruler was always regarded as the human executive of the chief god of the town. This system spread into the whole of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Canaan. Marduk, the son of the god Ea, the lord of the earth, became the chief god of Babylon in the Amorite period (1826-1526 B.C.). He was the most powerful god, because Babylon became the metropolis of the entire Babylonian empire. Like his father, Ea, Marduk was a wise and clever god, his power was his knowlege in science of magic, which he used for the benefit of mankind by protecting them from illness. After his rise to importance as god of the metropolis of the entire Babylonian realm, physical power was also attributed to him; he replaced his father Ellil (Ea) the god of the earth; and in later versions of the Gilgamesh Epos, it was Marduk (not Ellil) who killed the wicked Tiamat, the mother of the Earth and chaos; from its body he created the sky, the earth, the plants, the animals and mankind.

• Other town gods recognized Marduk as the lord of the town gods, and at the New Year feast, he had the right to gather the other gods in his town of Babylon.
• Marduk's son and personal assistant, "Nebo", was the god of writings, who wrote down on tablets all the great deeds of his father.

• At the end of the 2nd millenium B.C., another power arose in the north of the Babylonian state, Assyria, and in the 13th century B.C., Tukulti-Ninurta destroyed the town of Babylon.
• The Assyrian lord, Assur, now replaced Marduk.
• For more than six hundred years, the people of Babylon remembered Marduk, although no longer an important god, and when Nabopolassar finally founded the new Babylonian Empire, Marduk again ascended the throne as national god of the gods.
• His son Nebukhadnezzar conquered the entire Fertile Crescent, and even Jerusalem (605 B.C.), he rebuilt the temple for Marduk in Babylon with cedars from the Lebanon.
• This new Babylonian empire lasted less than 100 years, and in 538, Babylon was conquered by Kyros, King of the Persians, which heralded the end of the Babylonian culture.
• The religion of Marduk came to an end when his temple was destoyed by Xerxes I, although his name remained in use as personal name; Persian and Aramaic literature was influenced by the great epics and hymns of the Babylonian culture.

• A clay tablet found at Borsippa mentions a royal official named Marduka at or around the time of the Persian King Xerxes I, the supposed date of the story of the .

• In some, even authorative, publications we find a mistaken assumption *, that must have been over 100 years old, based on the verses:
  
  ish yehudi haya beshushan habira ushemo mordokhay ben ya'ir ben shime'i ben qish ish yemini:
  asher hogla miyrushalayim 'im haggola asher hogleta 'im yekhonya"
  (Now in Shushan the capital there was a certain Jew, whose name was Mordecai the son of Yair, the son of Shim'i the son of Qish, a Binyaminite;
  who had been exiled from Jerusalem with the captivity which had been carried away into exile with Yekhonya king of Judea") (Est. 2:5-6).
• The exile was effected in the year 589 B.C., "Ahasuerus", King of Persia in the story, was presumably Xerxes I, who ruled from 486 till 465 B.C.

* Albert I. Baumgartner in "Encyclopaedia Judaica", Jerusalem 1971, vol. 14 p. 1050 col. 1.
* Z. Ariel, "Sefer haHag wehaMo'ed" (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1988, p. 188.
* Dr. Th. C. Vriezen "De Literatuur van Oud-Israel" Den Haag n.d. p 207.
* Philip Goodman, "The Purim Anthology", Philadelphia 1973, p. 368 (Mordecai...who had been carried away from Jerusalem...).

• These mistaken conclusions are based on an incorrect division of the Biblical text into verses, which was carried out in the Middle Ages more than one thousand years after the canonisation of the last book of the Bible; if we omit the division between these two verses, the subordinating conjunction "asher" (who), may refer to "Qish" and not to , in this case was the fourth generation after the exile, which is quite logical.
• The Jewish tradition associated the name Qish with the name of King Saul's father:
  
  wayehi-ish mibin yamin ushemo qish ben-avi'el ben-tseror ben-bekhorat ben-afiah ben-ish yemini gibor hayil: welo-haya ven ushemo sha'ul..... (Now there was a man of Binyamin, whose name was Qish, the son of Avi'el, the son of Zeror, the son of Bekhorat, the son of Afiah, a Yemini, a mighty man of valour. And he had a son, whose name was Saul........)
• In the final observations we shall discuss this association.

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