In Defence of Purim

Purim is on at the moment. (For those who don't know the story, there was a plot in Persia to destroy all the Jews which backfired thanks to Esther and the tables were turned on "the enemies of the Jews".)

This Jewish festival often comes under scorn from secular people as it celebrates the killing of 75,000 enemies of the Jews over 3 days. You can imagine people like Dawkins and Hitchens calling this genocide and citing this as yet another of the "countless examples" of the harm religion does.

I don't buy it for a second. Of course some claim the whole story is meant as a parable, mystery play or a joke, that the events in the Book of Esther didn't happen historically. I think this is true, but has nothing to do with whether what was portrayed in Esther is genocide or not.

The appropriate parallelwould be this -- the Jews, gypsies, gay Germans etc. etc. got the chance to get together in Nazi Germany and pre-emptively kill all the SS officers before the Holocaust took place. Would people really see anything wrong with it? I wouldn't. Of course this would be before most of the Holocaust took place which might seem problematic. But given the certainty of our historical hindsight it would be fine with me. Similarly, given what we know of human nature and the history of genocide, if the Purim story is real, that genocide was just as certain. And yes, in our analogy the casualties in Germany would be enormous, given what we KNOW of the high level of complicity of society at the time -- so were the casualties enormous in Persia.

If I was transported back in time to say Turkey just before the Armenian genocide started I would definitely use current information to enable the Armenians to kill the Turks -- obviously only those who were about to go and butcher the Armenians. I hope most people would agree with me, that the more pacifist option of having millions leave Turkey in the night, with all the famine and disease this would bring -- is NOT a better option.

There are plenty of genocides described in the Bible. The 2 most obvious are Joshua's conquest of the land of Israel and Moses commanding that Midianite children be killed. But once people perceive something immoral in a religion (however rightly) they often start being overzealous in their criticism -- not every death in the sacred text of a religion is genocidal madness, although many are. To see this one as immoral is to take away the right of any people to defend themselves.

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