Endnote 6 – The Book of Esther

This was convincingly demonstrated in a 1964 article by the German Semitist H. Wehr, “Das Tor des Königs in Buche Esther und verwandte Ausdrücke,” Der Islam 39 (1964), pp. 247–260. Almost all modern authors dealing with the Book of Esther have ignored this article, possibly because Wehr was primarily an Arabic scholar and the article appeared in a journal devoted principally to Islam. Wehr bases his conclusions on data from Herodotus and Xenophon, as well as on Assyrian and Babylonian royal inscriptions and even medieval Oriental sources.