When you sit down in front of the
television, you probably turn on a familiar type of show, one you’re
comfortable with. Maybe you like mysteries or romantic comedies or police
procedurals. (Or maybe you want to watch a romantic-comedy-police-procedural!)
Regardless of what you enjoy
watching, you know what to expect. The mystery gets solved, the mismatched
couple ends up madly in love, the crook is arrested.
One of the more popular story types
in the ancient world was called a “court tale.” Keep in mind it was dangerous
in the real world for anyone to criticize the king, but in a court tale,
everyone laughs. Typically, the ruler is well-meaning, but is surrounded by
evil courtiers. These evil courtiers are jealous and want to destroy the
good-hearted hero. They tell lies and misdirect the king’s actions. The hero,
however, stands up for the truth. Ultimately the hero is vindicated while the
evil courtiers go to their doom.
Court tales are both funny and
subversive. And they occur in scripture. The book of Esther is a good example.
The Persian ruler Artaxerxes is crazy. He holds a six-month drinking party,
gets rid of Queen Vashti for refusing to parade before his courtiers wearing
only her crown, then holds an empire-wide beauty pageant to replace her, which
is won by Esther the Jew. Meanwhile his evil courtier Haman is jealous of
Esther’s uncle Mordecai, also connected to the court, and convinces the emperor
that all Jews must be killed. Queen Esther defies court protocol, tickles her
emperor’s curiosity and ultimately unmasks Haman, who is executed on the same
gallows he meant to use for Mordecai.
The book of Daniel features several
court tales in which the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar is charmed by Daniel’s
ability to interpret dreams, and then gulled by his jealous advisers into
ordering the death of Daniel’s countrymen. Daniel and his friends wend their
way through several crises, but they always come out on top, and Nebuchadnezzar
is restored to good sense. (At least until the next episode, anyway.)
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