Stateira suggested for Queen Vashti

by Damien F. Mackey “However, the possibility that Vashti is a hypocoristicon of a compounded name Sta-teira = Asta-teira = Washta-teira … ought also to be considered”. Jacob Hoschander Female Characters in the Book of Esther These are more difficult to determine than are the leading male characters whom I have now identified historically (in bold print) as: • “KING AHASUERUS” (Darius the Mede) is King Neriglissar and King Cyrus; • “HAMAN” is (King Amon of Judah and Mehuman/Memukan of Book of Esther) King Jehoiachin the Captive; • MORDECAI is the Jew, Joakim, of the Story of Susanna (Daniel 13:1-4), the husband of the heroine, and the BILSHAN (Marduk-bēl-shunu?) of Ezra 2:2 and Nehemiah 7:7, and perhaps the Marduka/Marduku a name attested amongst officials of the Persian court. With Haman firmly identified as King Jehoiachin of Judah, an anti-Jew (specifically referring to religious Temple-building Jews). who, with his sons is historically known (e.g. "Jehoiachin's Ration Tablets"), then we are perfectly placed to situate the entire Esther drama in its proper historical setting: namely, KING JEHOIACHIN NOW AS A FREE AGENT DURING THE REIGN OF DARIUS THE MEDE/CYRUS/AHASUERUS. Queen Esther, Ishtar-udda-sha (“Ishtar is her light”) and, thereby, Hadassah (-udda-sha), had (I think) the Hebrew name of Susanna, the husband of Joakim (= Mordecai). Who Queen Esther was not She was not, as is sometimes suggested, “the queen” mentioned in Nehemiah 2:6: “Then the king, with the queen sitting beside him, asked me, ‘How long will your journey take, and when will you get back?’ It pleased the king to send me; so I set a time”. This was a “king of Babylon” (13:6), the ruler here being Nebuchednezzar ‘the Great’. He and his queen belonged to an era (Chaldean) earlier than that of Queen Esther (Medo-Persian). Queen Esther is also most unlikely to have been the wife of Xerxes, Amestris. Phillip G. Kayser gives some sound reasons why this would be the case: https://kaysercommentary.com/Sermons/Old%20Testament/Esther/Esther%20Part%201.md “Every Xerxes advocate admits that there is one point that just doesn't seem to fit. Amestris, Xerxes wife seems to be queen longer than Scripture allows Vashti to live. Some have said that Vashti/Amestris is divorced for a while and later replaces Esther. Others have said that Esther is Amestris. But not only is Amestris a debauched, cruel and sadistic woman, she is a Persian, not a Jewess, and Amestris was around before the 7th year. I think this is a major problem for Xerxes and warrants a strike”. What makes rather tricky the identification of Medo-Persian queens is the multiplication in king lists of their king’s names, such as Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius. And so we find that the most likely Esther (= Hadassah) name, Atossa (Old Persian Hutaosâ), has been connected all at once to Cyrus, Artaxerxes, Cambyses, and Darius. Who Queen Esther was With Haman now firmly fixed historically as Jehoiachin the Captive, who would have been only 18 when he went into Babylonian Exile (2 Kings 24:8-12), and about 55 when Amēl-Marduk (= Belshazzar) released him from prison (25:27-30), and close to 60 when Darius the Mede (aged 62) took over the kingdom, then, biologically, his conspiracy must have occurred during the 12-year reign of Darius the Mede (= Cyrus). This would firmly establish Hadassah/Esther as the historical Atossa, said to have been “the most prominent lady in the history of ancient Iran”, and thought to have been the daughter (read “wife”) of King Cyrus: https://www.iranchamber.com/history/atossa/atossa.php Atossa The Celestial and Terrestrial Lady of Ancient Iran By: Shirin Bayani Atossa, the daughter of Cyrus the Great, wife of two Achamenian kings, Cambyses and Darius and mother of Xerxes is the most prominent lady in the history of ancient Iran. Not much is known about her life, except that she has witnessed the reign of the four first Achamenian kings and that she has played a decisive role in the long period of turbulence and significance. …. [End of quote] Since, however, there were not as many as “four first Achamenian [Achaemenid] kings”, some of these names must be duplicates, as must be the Cyrus-like Artaxerxes II (c. 445-359/8 BC, conventional dating), whose reign has been estimated (wrongly) to have occurred about 85 years after the death of Cyrus (c. 530 BC, conventional dating). Because of the chaos that historians and archaeologists have enabled to engulf Medo-Persian history, the name Atossa gets stretched about amongst various Persian names. One female of this name, Atossa, for instance, was also supposed to have been married to a Cambyses and, then, to Darius the Great: https://www.livius.org/articles/person/darius-the-great/4-dynastic-marriages/ Darius married three times to improve his position: 1. Atossa (Old Persian *Utautha), a daughter of Cyrus. She had already been married to her half-brother Cambyses, but the couple did not have children. …. [End of quote] King Artaxerxes, so-called II “Mnemon”, Jacob Hoschander has shown to have exhibited the very same character and personality traits that we find in King Ahasuerus of the Book of Esther (Esther in the Light of History). For one, Artaxerxes II was reputed as having been one unable to hold his liquor, which may explain the decision by King Ahasuerus, “in high spirits from wine”, publicly to display his wife, Vashti (Esther 1:10-11). “Finally, under the influence of wine, he was losing his senses. …”. (Hoschander, p. 94). Jacob Hoschander then proceeds to suggest that Artaxerxes II’s wife, Stateira, makes the best candidate for Queen Vashti (pp. 108-109): There is still another point to be discussed. The name of the queen of Artaxerxes II was not Vashti, but Stateira. Plutarch is no doubt right on this point, as Ctesias who lived at the court of Artaxerxes must have known the name of that queen. As far as the other Greek writers are concerned, all of them are more or less dependent upon Ctesias, and they took over the name of this queen from the latter. The name of the queen was indeed Stateira, but having been a famous beauty and a great favourite with the people, she was styled Vashti, which, as was recognized long ago … means in the Persian language ‘beauty’. In the memory of the people, her proper name was displaced by this epithet. We have a classic example of such a phenomenon in the name of the famous Greek woman who lived in Egypt under the reign of Amasis. Her real name was Doricha, yet Herodotus and other classic writers call her by her epithet Rhōdōpis, ‘the rosy-cheeked’, though they knew that Sappho mentioned her by her real name. …. Our author may likewise have known that the queen’s real name was Stateira, and nevertheless preferred to call her by the widely-known epithet Vashti. However, the possibility that Vashti is a hypocoristicon of a compounded name Sta-teira = Asta-teira = Washta-teira, which may mean ‘the beauty of the god Mercury’, ought also to be considered. [End of quote] While there is uncertainty about the wife King Neriglissar, a supposed Chaldean king - but whom I have instead identified with King Ahasuerus (Darius the Mede) of the Esther drama - it is suggested that she (presumably a Babylonian, a descendant of Nebuchednezzar) was one Kashshaya. Now, the first element of this name, Kash-, is not at all unlike that of Vash-ti.