"The Banishment of Vashti" by Paolo Veronese, via Wikimedia Commons

I have argued before that Esther is full of sexual and/or gendered humour, but that was before I took the topic of humour in the Bible (documents from very different cultural contexts from ours) seriously. Now however I have nine criteria to measure whether it is likely that authors intended the humour we find. These are all present in Esther chapter 1:

1. incongruity
2. lighthearted mood
3. surprise
4. ingenuity (cleverness is often a mark of humour think of puns)
5. hyperbole
6. inferiority
7. disguise or something or someone pretending to be something else
8. “inelasticity” (following Bergson)
9. human pretension revealed in all its lack of glory!

So, enjoy

So, here’s the link to the audio: Humour in the Bible: book 17: Esther

The book of Esther tells a terrible story, of attempted genocide averted. Too often Christian readers miss the humour in the story, of course some of it is sex related, and/or poking fun at gender expectations, so perhaps there are reasons for the blindness.