4 And Let the
girl who pleases the king be queen instead of Vashti.’ This pleased the king,
and he did so. 5 Now there was a Jew in the citadel of Susa whose name was
Mordecai son of Jair son of Shimei son of Kish, a Benjamite.
Mordecai. The connection between Mordecai’s name and
that of the god Marduk is well known. In the MT, the name is vocalized /mordŏxai/;
in the Septuagint it is Mardchaios. The god Marduk, mentioned in the
Bible as Merodach, began his way—just like Mordecai the Jew—as a secondary deity
in the Mesopotamian pantheon. His name was written in cuneiform as amar-utu,
commonly interpreted as Sumerian amar uku.k ‘calf of the sun-god’.
It wasn’t until the time of Hammurabi
(early second millennium BCE) and Babylon’s rise as the cultural and religious
center in Mesopotamia that he won his place as the godhead of the Babylonian
pantheon.
In the second year of his reign, while
crushing a rebellion in Babylon, Xšayāršā destroyed Marduk’s statue. The choice
of names here may serve to show that at the end, Marduk will prevail.
Can it be that a Jew bears the name of
a gentile—and even of a gentile god? Certainly. There was a year when all the
sons of Jewish priests bore the name Alexander’ in addition to their Hebrew name,
and in return Alexander of Macedonia retracted the order to place his statue in
the temple; to this day, many Iranian Jews bear names with the element Allah.
It seems, then, that a gentile-theophoric name for a Jew is quite plausible. We
also know that the name Marduka was quite common in the Achaemenid period.
There was at least one official with this name at the royal court, possibly of
Babylonian origin. Marduka whose clay tablets have remained was in charge of
the flour supply. The clay tablets he left are part of a whole collection of such
tablets in Elamite cuneiform in the excavations at Persepolis. (Thamar E.
Gindin, The Book of Esther Unmasked [N.P.: Zeresh Books, 2016], 89-90)
