What is Purim?

Why it is called Purim

Pur means lot. In the book of Esther, the king’s favorite, Haman, decides to destroy every Jew in the empire because one Jew, Mordecai, will not bow to him. He leaves the date to chance.

they cast Pur, that is, the lot, before Haman from day to day, and from month to month, and chose the twelfth month, which is the month Adar.

The lot lands on the thirteenth of Adar, almost a year away. Purim is simply the plural, lots, and the book says the feast was named that way on purpose, after the plot failed (Esther 9:24–26). The word itself is borrowed from Akkadian, puru. Lots like Haman’s were real: a clay cube from the ninth century BC, now in the Yale Babylonian Collection, is inscribed as the puru of Iahali, a minister of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III.

A day turned upside down

On the thirteenth of Adar, the day Haman’s decree was to be carried out, “it turned out that the opposite happened” (Esther 9:1). The Jews defend themselves, then rest and feast: on the fourteenth in the provinces, on the fifteenth in the capital, Susa. Mordecai and Esther write to every province to keep both days, every year, in every generation.

that they should make them days of feasting and gladness, and of sending presents of food to one another, and gifts to the needy.

Purim is still kept that way. Jewish law draws four duties from the book:

1. Hearing the scroll. The book of Esther, the Megillah, is read aloud in the evening and again in the morning.
2. Gifts of food. Friends send each other baskets of treats, mishloach manot.
3. Gifts to the poor. Money or food for at least two people in need.
4. A feast. A festive meal on the afternoon of Purim.

Most communities celebrate on 14 Adar, which falls in late February or March. Jerusalem keeps Shushan Purim on the fifteenth, as Susa did, because the Mishnah gives that day to cities walled since the time of Joshua (Megillah 1:1). The day before Purim is the Fast of Esther, which recalls the three days she fasted before going to the king uninvited (Esther 4:16).

Why people drown out Haman’s name

When the reader reaches Haman’s name, the room erupts: booing, stamping, and rattles called graggers, ra’ashan in Hebrew. The noise is about memory. Esther calls Haman “the Agagite,” and Jewish readers have long linked him to Agag, king of Amalek, the people who attacked Israel’s stragglers in the desert (1 Samuel 15:8). The Torah’s command about Amalek is to erase even the name:

you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under the sky. You shall not forget.

So, at least for a moment, the name is blotted out by noise.

Costumes, pastries and a hidden God

Purim is the most carnival-like day of the Jewish year. Children and adults wear costumes, and many synagogues stage a comic play, the Purim spiel. Bakers fill triangular cookies called hamantaschen, Yiddish for Haman’s pockets; in Israel they are oznei Haman, Haman’s ears. The Talmud even says a person should drink on Purim until he cannot tell “cursed be Haman” from “blessed be Mordecai” (Megillah 7b), a line rabbis have argued over ever since.

Some explain the costumes by the book itself. Esther hides who she is until the last banquet, and the Hebrew book of Esther never mentions God. Everything happens behind a mask of coincidence: a sleepless king, a well-timed feast, a gallows built for the wrong man. Purim celebrates a hidden hand, and a day that turned.