80 Fun Facts About Purim

Purim commemorates the rescue of the Jews living under which ancient power?

The villain was the royal vizier, and the heroine was a Jewish queen who hid her origins.

What does the Hebrew word Purim literally mean?

Haman cast lots to choose the date of the massacre, and the holiday took its name from them.

From which language did Hebrew borrow the word pur, 'lot'?

Esther 9:26 explains that the days were called Purim after the name pur.

On which day of the Hebrew month of Adar is Purim celebrated?

In leap years it falls in Adar II, which happens seven times every 19 years.

Which part of the Bible tells the story behind Purim?

Read aloud in synagogue on the holiday, it is known simply as 'the Megillah', the Scroll.

The name Ahasuerus is believed to derive from the Old Persian name of which king?

The Hebrew name derives from the Old Persian Xšayāršā, though tradition sometimes equated him with Artaxerxes.

What was Esther's original Hebrew name?

It means myrtle; the name Esther is Persian.

What was Mordecai's relationship to Esther?

Some rabbinic commentators read the Hebrew as saying she was actually his wife.

Mordecai belonged to which tribe of Israel?

His ancestor Kish had been carried into exile from Judah by Nebuchadnezzar.

Which queen was deposed for refusing to display her beauty to the king's drunken guests?

The Midrash makes her the daughter of Belshazzar and great-granddaughter of Nebuchadnezzar.

How long was the king's opening drinking feast for the princes of his 127 provinces?

A seven-day feast for the people of Shushan followed, plus a separate feast for the women hosted by the queen.

Which two palace guards' assassination plot did Mordecai expose?

His service was recorded in the court's daily record and forgotten until the king's sleepless night.

Why did Haman decide to destroy all the Jews of the empire?

He obtained the king's permission and funds and picked the date by chance.

Haman is called 'the Agagite', linking him to which ancient enemy of Israel?

The command to 'blot out the remembrance of Amalek' underlies the noise made at his name.

How many days did Esther ask the Jews of Shushan to fast before she approached the king?

She declared: 'If I perish, I perish.'

What was the name of Haman's wife, who urged him to build a gallows for Mordecai?

The gallows he built was used to hang Haman himself.

What kept the king awake on the night that turned the story?

Having the court records read to him, he learned Mordecai had never been rewarded for saving his life.

Asked what should be done for the man the king wished to honour, what did Haman propose?

He assumed the honoree was himself, then had to lead Mordecai through the city.

At what event did Esther reveal she was Jewish and expose the plot against her people?

The king ordered Haman hanged on the gallows meant for Mordecai.

How many of the Jews' enemies were killed throughout the empire, according to the Megillah?

Another 500 attackers and Haman's ten sons died in Shushan; no spoils were taken.

On which day of Adar do cities walled since Joshua's time keep Shushan Purim?

Today it is kept on the 15th only in one city, while Hebron and Tiberias hedge by celebrating both days.

Which is the only city where Purim is definitively kept on the later, walled-city date?

Fighting in the walled city of Shushan had continued a day longer, hence the extra day.

What is the name for the gifts of food and drink exchanged on Purim?

Halakha requires at least two different ready-to-eat foods sent to at least one person.

What is mattanot la-evyonim?

Two donations to two poor people fulfil the obligation.

According to Rava in the Talmud, how drunk should one get on Purim?

The Aramaic phrase ad delo yada, 'until he does not know', gives the Israeli parade its name.

What is the Adloyada?

The first one was held in 1912.

In which city was the first Adloyada parade held, in 1912?

Teacher Avraham Aldema of the 'Noisy Buddies' club started it.

How many times is Haman's name read aloud during the Megillah, prompting noise each time?

Congregants stamp, rattle and shout to blot out his name.

What is the Yiddish name for the ratchet noisemaker used at Haman's name?

The Hebrew term is ra'ashan, from ra-ash, 'noise'; many Sephardic communities reject it as an interruption.

Where did some worshippers historically write Haman's name so they could stamp it out at the reading?

Others knocked two smooth stones together until the name was worn away.

What shape are hamantaschen?

The name means 'Haman's pockets'; in Hebrew they are oznei Haman, 'Haman's ears'.

What is the oldest and most traditional hamantash filling?

Prune jam, powidl or lekvar, is a close second.

Which meat-filled dumplings do Ashkenazi Jews traditionally eat in soup on Purim?

Sephardic Jerusalemites served baklava, kadayif and ma'amoul instead.

Among which community did the Purim custom of masks and costumes probably originate?

The timing suggests carnival influence.

What is a Purim spiel?

Modern spiels can lampoon anything from community gossip to Jewish life in general.

What is Purim Katan?

When there are two Adars, Purim proper falls in Adar II and the first month's date gets a minor observance.

Purim Vinz, celebrated a week after Purim in Frankfurt, commemorates deliverance from which event?

The Jewish quarter had been looted and the community expelled; the Chasam Sofer kept the day even in Pressburg.

Which Sephardic and Mizrahi custom is listed among Purim observances?

Masks, parades and wine round out the day.

The Purim scroll and which other book are the only Hebrew Bible books never to mention God?

Tradition sees God working through the story's coincidences instead.

In which section of the Hebrew Bible does the Purim scroll sit?

It was the last of the 24 books to be canonised by the Sages of the Great Assembly.

The Mishnah tractate that records the laws of Purim was redacted around which year?

The Talmud later adds details such as Vashti's royal Babylonian ancestry.

Which 1st-century historian recounts the origins of Purim in Book 11 of his Antiquities of the Jews?

Like the Greek Septuagint version, he calls the king Artaxerxes.

What is the ancient name of the Persian capital where the Esther story is set?

Excavations there famously turned up the Code of Hammurabi stele, carried off as plunder from Babylonia.

How must the reader pronounce the names of Haman's ten sons during the Megillah?

It signifies their simultaneous death.

What is the traditional Hebrew greeting for the holiday?

In Yiddish it is 'ah freilichin Purim' and in Ladino 'Purim Allegre'.

When the Fast of Esther on 13 Adar falls on Shabbat, to which day is it moved?

Friday is needed to prepare for Shabbat and the Purim that follows.

What is Purim Meshulash?

It happens at irregular intervals, most recently in the 2021 to 2025 stretch.

Which Nazi propagandist warned after Kristallnacht that Jews wanted 'a new Purim festival in Germany'?

On Purim 1942 ten Jews were hanged in Zduńska Wola in twisted 'revenge' for Haman's ten sons.

What position did Mordecai hold at the end of the story?

He instituted the annual commemoration of the deliverance.

Which additional prayer is inserted into the daily prayers and grace after meals on Purim?

Its name means 'for the miracles'.

How does modern scholarship generally regard the Purim story's biblical source?

Traditional readers still treat it as history.

In Israel hamantaschen go by the Hebrew name oznei Haman, referring to which part of the villain?

The same Hebrew name also covers a Sephardic pastry of twisted, fried strips of dough thought to originate in Spain and Italy.

One folk etymology derives 'hamantaschen' from the Yiddish montashn, which literally means what?

The theory holds the name shifted by association with Haman or by adding the Hebrew article ha-.

Which invention of the 1840s turned hamantash dough from a yeast bread into a cookie?

The switch became widespread only in the first half of the twentieth century.

The names Mordecai and Esther have been read as allusions to which pair of Mesopotamian gods?

The Book of Esther has more Akkadian and Aramaic loanwords than any other biblical book, and Haman has been compared to the Elamite god Humban.

Some scholars suggest the festival began as an alternative to which defunct observance on 13 Adar?

The 13th of Adar is now kept as the Fast of Esther, the eve of the holiday.

A Chabad tale links which Soviet leader's fatal stroke, on 1 March 1953, to the holiday that same day?

He died four days later, and the 'doctors' plot' and the nationwide pogroms it threatened were halted.

Hebron's 'Window Purim' recalls the community being saved when what mysteriously appeared in a window?

It let the Jews of Hebron pay off an extortion fee demanded by the Ottoman Pasha; the city also marks a 'Purim of Ibrahim Pasha'.

According to Herodotus, who was the wife of Xerxes, with no trace of Vashti or Esther?

Critics also note Mordecai would have been over a hundred years old in Xerxes' day if exiled with Jehoiachin as the book claims.

The Book of Esther is one of how many Megillot, or Scrolls, in the Hebrew Bible?

The Megillot sit within the Ketuvim, or Writings, and Esther later became part of the Christian Old Testament.

How many provinces 'from India to Cush' did the king rule, according to the opening verse of Esther?

127 provinces is the book's count, where Herodotus gives the empire only 20 satrapies — one of the exaggerations that lead most scholars to read Esther as a historical novella.

What did the sleepless king order on the night before Haman meant to ask for Mordecai's execution?

He had the chronicles read to him, and the record happened to open on Mordecai's unrewarded exposure of an assassination plot — the turn on which the whole book pivots.

Returning from the garden, what did the king think Haman was doing as he fell on Esther's couch?

Assaulting her was the king's reading — 'Will he even molest the queen while she is with me in the house?' — though Haman was in fact pleading for mercy; attendants covered his face at once.

What did the Jews pointedly refuse to do in every round of fighting described in Esther 9?

They refused to take any plunder, though the edict allowed it — a pointed reversal of King Saul, whose crown was forfeit for keeping forbidden spoil in the war that spared Haman's ancestor Agag.

Esther's Persian name is commonly traced to the goddess Ishtar or to a Persian word meaning what?

Star is the likely meaning, via a Persian word cognate with the English one, and Persian Jews to this day call themselves 'Esther's children'.

The citadel of Susa, where the whole Book of Esther is set, lies in which modern country?

Iran's town of Shush sits on the site: Susa was the capital of Elam and later the winter capital of the Persian kings, whose palace there Herodotus also describes.

Which manuscript find contains no Esther at all, perhaps because its copyists kept a calendar with no Purim?

The Dead Sea Scrolls lack Esther entirely, perhaps because the Qumran community kept a calendar with no Purim, or disapproved of a Jewish heroine married to a Persian king.

Which artist painted Haman's execution, as a crucifixion, in a corner of the Sistine Chapel ceiling?

Michelangelo shows Haman crucified on a tree rather than hanged — following the Vulgate, whose Latin calls the gallows a patibulum, the crossbeam of a cross.

What does Mordecai predict for the Jews if Esther keeps silent 'at this time', in Esther 4?

Relief will come from elsewhere, Mordecai says, but she and her father's house will not escape — and the speech ends with 'for such a time as this', the book's most quoted line.

Which eunuch in charge of the harem gave Esther special food, seven attendants and the best rooms?

Hegai kept the virgins; a second eunuch, Shaashgaz, kept the concubines to whom the women returned after their one night, unless the king summoned them again by name.

Which eunuch told the king a gallows stood ready at Haman's house, sealing his fate in Esther 7?

Harbona, one of the seven eunuchs from chapter 1, added that the gallows was meant for Mordecai 'who spoke up to help the king' — and the king's whole reply was 'Impale him on it!'

Which royal adviser warned that Vashti's defiance would teach every wife to despise her husband?

Memukan proposed the decree, and a midrash identifies him with Haman himself — so the man who had Vashti removed would later be destroyed by the queen who replaced her.

Whose 'Esther', written in 1718 and expanded in 1732, is counted as the first English oratorio?

Handel turned it into a concert piece almost by accident: the Bishop of London refused to let a Bible story be acted on stage, so it was sung without scenery — and the English oratorio was born.

Haman appears crucified in a vision at the start of Canto 17 of which work by Dante?

Purgatorio holds the vision: on the terrace of the wrathful Dante sees Haman hanging 'un crucifisso', an example of anger punished, with Ahasuerus, Esther and 'the just Mordecai' gathered round him.

According to Talmudic legend, which trade did Haman follow for twenty-two years before his rise?

Barber at Kefar Karzum, says the legend, and once so poor that he sold himself as a slave to Mordecai — details the rabbis supplied to make his later pride the more grotesque.

The Midrash makes Vashti the daughter of which Babylonian king, slain the night his city fell?

Belshazzar's daughter, by this account, was seized by Darius on the night of the writing on the wall and handed to his son Ahasuerus — which also made her Nebuchadnezzar's great-granddaughter.

Which Purim custom aimed at Haman did the emperors Honorius and Theodosius II ban?

Burning him in effigy was the offence — a puppet hanged, then burnt, to trumpets in medieval Provence — and the custom survived into the 1950s in remote communities of Kurdistan, where young Muslims sometimes joined in.

The Greek Esther closes with a note dating its arrival in Egypt to the fourth year of which couple?

Ptolemy and Cleopatra were names shared by several Egyptian rulers, so nobody knows which reign is meant — or who the priest Dositheus was who carried the 'Letter about Purim' to Egypt.

The Greek Esther recasts Haman as an alien from which land, the new threat to Judah in its day?

Macedonia had swallowed Persia under Alexander by the time the Greek version was made, so Haman becomes a Macedonian plotting to hand the empire to his countrymen, and the Jews become 'loyal Persians'.

Which French dramatist wrote the 1689 play 'Esther' for the noble girls' school at Saint-Cyr?

Racine wrote it when Madame de Maintenon asked him to return to sacred drama, and the play later supplied the plot for the first oratorio ever written in English.