Finding Mordechai at Persepolis

Abstract

The Quest for the Historical Mordechai in the Book of Esther is relevant for this reason that Old Persian scholars already found Hammedatha of Esther 3:1 at Persepolis (see W. Hinz 1973). The purpose in this study is to see if a person Mordechai can be found in cuneiform textsconcurrent with the book of Esther. The method is to collect data for the name of Mordechai at the Nippur Texts from the times of Artaxerxes I and Darius II (see H. V. Hilprecht 1904) with the actual reading of sapir Marduka “document of Mordechai” in Aramaic script on the text (Plate 66, Text 121) and similar ones by A. T. Clay in 1912. It was demonstrated that people with the name of Mordechai existed simultaneously with the events of the Book of Esther nearBabylon in the Persian Period. Further results came from added evidence in the PersepolisTreasury Texts with Aramaic on cones published by R. A. Bowman (1970) naming a person with linguistic slips: tmrk, or mtrk or finally relevant for this paper, mrtk from the end of the reign of Xerxes. Curiously, this person disappears on the Persepolis Treasury Texts the same year the Jews left Exile back to Jerusalem under Ezra in 457 BCE. This evidence cannot go unnoticed in the light of historical studies on the Book of Esther.