Albright the Beautician Reveals Secrets of Queen Esther’s Cosmetic Aids

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After Esther, ward of Mordecai, entered the harem of the Persian king Ahasuerus, she, along with the other virgins from whom the King would choose his queen, underwent a year’s preparation before being taken to the King.

The Bible tells us that:

“The full period of preparation prescribed for the women was twelve months, six months with oil and myrrh and six months with perfumes and cosmetics”.

Esther 2:12

A posthumously published paper by the great American archaeologist William Foxwell Albright (who died in 1971) sheds new light on what this preparation consisted of.

During the last years of his life, Albright re-studied an inscription on what had been identified as a ritual incense burner (see drawing). The object had been found in the Lachish excavations directed by J. L. Starkey during the 1930’s (the expedition was abruptly halted when Starkey was murdered by marauders while on his way to the opening of the Palestine Archaeological Museum). According to Professor A. Dupont-Sommer who originally translated the inscription on the object, it referred to “Incense … to Yah”. Yah is another name for Yahweh, the ineffable designation of the Hebrew God. It seemed clear that the inscription must have been inscribed on a ritual object involving the burning of incense.

However, Albright read a few of the letters in the inscription differently and came up with an entirely new translation. According to him, the inscription read simply, “Belonging to the daughter of Iyyos, son of Mahli the [royal] courier.” (Mahli is a Levite family mentioned in the Bible (Numbers 26:58). This is the first extrabiblical reference to this family.)

005Albright’s translation was the culmination of a reconsideration by a number of eminent scholars of the original translation of the inscription. Among these scholars was Harvard Professor Frank M. Cross, Jr., one of the world’s leading paleographers. It was Cross who first suggested the change in the reading of the letters in the inscription from which Albright produced his translation. However, Cross originally translated these letters differently from Albright because he divided the letters into words differently from Albright. But both agreed that the name “Yah” did not appear in the inscription. Thus, a major support for a religious interpretation of the inscription was knocked out. However, according to Cross’ word division, the inscription still referred to incense, which has an obvious religious connotation. Albright’s word division removed even this religious element. Recently queried by The Biblical Archaeology Review, Professor Cross stated that he now agrees with Albright’s word division—the inscription mentions neither Yah, nor incense. Thus, no religious connotation.

All of this raises the question as to whether the object was a cultic incense altar after all. For Albright, the answer was a resounding “no”. “The religious interpretation [of the object] is entirely erroneous”, he wrote. The object “has an easy explanation as belonging to the secular world of cosmetics and beautification of women, especially during the Persian (Achaemenian) period.”

According to Albright, the object was simply a cosmetic burner!

Albright found support for this identification in some South Arabian burners of the same general form and size. These burners are cuboid blocks with four stumpy legs and a bowl carved out on top, like the Lachish burner and other similar Palestinian burners. On each of the four sides of some of these South Arabian cosmetic burners is inscribed the name of an aromatic substance, all belonging to the category of beshamim, or spices, mentioned frequently 006in the Bible. These inscriptions are much like an apothecary’s labels. The spices were chosen not only for their odor, but also as insect repellents and for therapeutic purposes. The evidence of the fragrant resinous substances which had been consumed on top of these South Arabian cosmetic burners still clung to the shallow basins when they were excavated. Significantly enough, the names of frankicense and myrrh, i.e., religious incense, do not appear on these inscribed South Arabian burners.

According to Albright, the many objects of the same general form erroneously identified as Palestinian “incense burners” were obviously borrowed from these secular South Arabian models but without inscriptions. The single one with an inscription—from Lachish—when thought to have a religious meaning, misled scholars into believing that all of these objects were religious incense burners when in fact they were nothing but cosmetic burners.

“They are secular, not cultic, in purpose, and have nothing to do with religion”, says Albright.

The Lachish cosmetic burner dates from the period of the Esther story, so this naturally led Albright to identify it with the kind of cosmetic preparations which the Bible tells us Esther underwent.

Precisely how the cosmetics were used in this preparation, archaeology does not tell us. However, Albright found a passage in a rare book published in London in 1868, entitled The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia by Sir S. W. Baker, in which the author describes how a variety of perfumed spices—oil of roses, oil of sandalwood, essence of the mimosa tree, essence of musk, and oil of cloves—were applied by the semi-nomadic Arab women of eastern Sudan:

“The women have a peculiar method of scenting their bodies and clothes, by an operation that is considered to be one of the necessities of life and which is repeated at regular intervals. In the floor of the tent or hut … a small hole is excavated sufficiently large as to hold … a fire of charcoal … into which the woman about-to-be-scented throws a handful of various drugs. She then takes off the cloth or tope which forms her dress, and crouches naked over the fumes while she arranges her robe to fall as a mantle from her neck to the ground like a tent … None of the precious fumes can escape, all being kept under the robe, exactly as if she wore a crinoline with an incense burner … She now begins to perspire freely in the hut or tent; and … the volatile oil from the burning perfumes is immediately absorbed [by her skin]. By the time that the fire has expired the scenting process is completed and both her person and the robe are redolent of incense with which they are so thoroughly impregnated that I have frequently smelt a party of women a full hundred yards distant.”

In some such way as this, Esther and the other women of Ahasuerus’ harem applied perfumed spices and balms to their bodies, with the aid of cosmetic burners like that found at Lachish.

This method of applying aromatics to the body and clothes with a cosmetic burner also sheds background light on a passage from Psalm 45: “Your robes are all fragrant with myrrh and aloes and cassin” (Psalm 45:8).

(For further details, see W. F. Albright, “The Lachish Cosmetic Burner and Esther 2:12” in H. N. Bream et al. (edd.), A Light Unto My Path: Essays in Honor of Jacob B. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1974).

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After Esther, ward of Mordecai, entered the harem of the Persian king Ahasuerus, she, along with the other virgins from whom the King would choose his queen, underwent a year’s preparation before being taken to the King.
The Bible tells us that: