Mark Gagnon

Purim remains one of the most joyous holidays in the Jewish calendar.

I actually went to Purim in Williamsburg this past year.

I pulled up.

It's a massive party.

There's lights and trucks with music.

It's a celebration of survival and a community saved by destruction at the last minute, all that stuff.

And at the heart of that celebration is a Persian king

who, whether the details are historical or literary, represents the complex relationship between the Jewish diaspora and the empire that both ruled over them and at times may have even protected them.

So just an interesting detail, and I think worth mentioning if we're going to do an episode on Xerxes.

So religion is a huge part of Xerxes reign.

He was very much into religious freedom, and he himself is even referenced in the Christian Bible and the Jewish Hebrew Old Testament.

But now let's take a look at the final act of Xerxes' life.

After his Greek campaign, Xerxes largely withdrew from military adventurism.

He wasn't going out on campaigns, and the last 15 or so years of his reign are kind of poorly documented.

The Greek sources lose interest once the Greco-Persian Wars end, and the Persian inscriptions tend to focus on the building projects rather than...

you know, his day to day life for the monotony of his reign or the political narratives around his time.

What we do know is that Xerxes continued to rule the empire, continued to, you know, build massive structures and appears to have maintained the basic administrative structure that his father had established.

The empire didn't collapse after the Greek defeat.

It was actually the opposite.

The Achaemenid Empire would endure for another century and a half, all the way up until Alexander the Great actually destroyed it in 330 BC.