When ancient Jewish literature becomes American scripture: The case of Esther in the United States

Abstract

The biblical story of Queen Esther rescuing ancient Persia’s Jewish population from annihilation has proven to be a pliable resource in competitions over power and place in contexts beyond the book’s murky origins in Jewish antiquity. In fact, Esther has figured frequently in public discourse in the modern United States. In this article, I use the optic of “scripturalization,” drawing on Vincent Wimbush’s theorization, to argue that Esther has become a flexible American scripture, bound up in modern U.S. discourses of law and moral order, freedom and rights, and patriotism and civic responsibility. While many American Esthers have been activated over the life of the nation, this article focuses on two in particular—that of abolitionist Angelina Grimké in the 1830s and that of a 2024 white paper entitled “Project Esther” from the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—to show how Esther has been constructed variously to regulate gendered speech, produce racialized paradigms of national belonging, and intervene in policy debates about immigration, education, and U.S. support for Israel. Insisting that Esther’s story as scripture is continually constituted, the article models an approach that moves beyond moralizing paradigms of “use” and “misuse” when it comes to tracing histories of scriptural production.