Dr. Adam Silverstein (2:28)

Thank you for having me.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (2:29)

Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (2:35)

Sure. Well, I'm a professor of Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and my field is broadly the history of Abrahamic religions in the Near Middle East. Among other things, I'm interested in interactions between religious traditions. And Haman is a character who appears in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. So he was right for a comparative research project.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (2:58)

Yeah, that definitely sounds like a good starting point, given what I read in the book. Now, first off, I did want to start with what I mentioned in the introduction, which is the extent to which Haman is actually real. So first off, myth bust for me. Is he real?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (3:15)

Okay, well, as with every question to do with religious traditions, for me the answer is it depends whom you ask. And I don't want to philosophize too much, but I guess it really depends on what we mean by real. So as a bokeh man who generated fear and even ridicule amongst Jewish Christians and Muslims over the past couple of millennia, he was very certainly real. But I guess what you're asking is whether the adherents of these religious traditions are thinking about a person who walked the earth and got up to the mischief that they ascribed to him. And I think for that the answer is more complicated. And I guess I'll just make two points about this. The first is that even if there was a living and breathing Haman who walked around, his character has been so overlain with extra traditions and details over the centuries that there's almost certainly a large gap between the Haman who existed and the Haman who is remembered to have existed by Jews, Christians, Muslims. And the second point is that there's quite a bit of historical evidence to suggest what the historical backgrounds of the biblical and Quranic Hammans were. So events and characters that are closely related to the Hammons that we do find in Judeo, Christian and Islamic traditions. So I think it would be safest to say that Haman was, quote unquote, based on historical characters and events, even if there are gaps between the historical evidence and how he's been described and remembered by subsequent generations. So that was. I weaseled my way out of a yes or no answer.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (4:42)

Well, I mean, that makes it more interesting as a sort of figure of analysis, though also more challenging. So how did you approach that complexity? Kind of. Obviously that is what you've just said is in the book, but that's not where the book stops. So how did you sort of come up with that and then go, well, now what?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (5:00)

So, I mean, Haman occurs, I guess, in the earliest version in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Esther. And I don't know if listeners are aware of the story, but I'll tell it in a kind of broad, broad strokes. So Esther is a story about the Jews of the Ancient Persian Empire under the Persian king Xerxes I. And it's sort of a combination between a Cinderella story and an Arabian Nights court intrigue. Basically, there are two heroes. A man, Mordecai, who represents the Jews, and a woman, Esther, his orphaned cousin, whom he adopts. Now a vizier by the name of Haman is promoted and expects that people frustrate before him. And they all do, except for Mordecai, who refuses to prostrate because he says he's Jewish. And that is a problem. It doesn't explain why it's a problem, but he just refuses to do so. So Haman realizes that the Jews are a problem and plots to annihilate them. In the meantime, Esther, the orphaned cousin whom he adopted, wins a beauty contest and becomes the queen. So this is the Cinderella side of the story, basically. To cut a long story short, Mordecai and Esther combine forces to foil Hamad's plot. And the Jews are saved. And 75,000 plus Persians who had supported Haman are killed throughout the empire. And an annual holiday named as Purim is instituted to commemorate these events. Until today, Purim is celebrated by Jews all over the world. So that is the base story. But every time a community read it or.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (6:33)

Kind of read it out loud in a ceremonious way in a synagogue, they would add elaborations or translate it into a local language. And each time it got translated or elaborated upon, it accrued details.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (6:47)

And traditions, usually called midrashim in English, in Hebrew. So these traditions were often very, very far from the original text. And Haman's character became different from what it originally was in the Hebrew Bible. So rather than just being a two dimensional figure, we ended up with this 3D villain who has so many crimes associated with him that I realized that there's a book's worth of material here.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (7:18)

Yeah. That is in fact a piece or one piece of there. What you mentioned is where I want to go next, which is the kind of gaps between the tradition we're most familiar with, which. Thank you for expl. And what's actually in the text, because it turns out there is, as you mentioned, rather a gap. So if we go back to the texts, what are the different versions of Haman that we see there?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (7:41)

Okay. So the main point is that although every book of the Bible was translated of, the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek and the Septuagint and then thereafter into other languages, the Book of Esther was deemed to be problematic. It puzzled its audiences almost immediately and certainly over the past couple of millennia, there are no references to God in the original Hebrew text. There's no religion, prayer, nothing that we would expect a biblical book to have. So there's been a lot of exegetical elaborations that were added to the text. But another subtler way of correcting the problems in the Hebrew version of Esther was to include these corrections and changes in in translations of the text. So for instance, the Septuagint, which is a Greek rendering of Esther from the second or first century bce, includes no fewer than six extra passages that weren't in the Hebrew story. So prayers and dreams of the heroes, the texts of the official edicts that were circulated throughout the Persian Empire and so on, as well as subtle changes to the Russias themselves and God and prayer and all sorts of things that we would expect feature. So the Septuagint itself kept being translated into other Christian languages such as Ethiopic, Armenian, Slavonic. And each time it got translated, the text itself could be changed, consciously or otherwise. And what's interesting to me is that the Haman character is the one that changes the most between the different versions. So in the Hebrew Bible he's known as an Amalekite, they call him an Agagite, which is a reference to the Amalekite king. But in the Septuagint he's a Macedonian or a Bugiyan, which means a show off of some sort. And in slightly later versions from late antiquity he's an Edomite. He might be a Christian or a Roman. Samaritan versions have him as a Jew. So every time the text goes through a translation or a kind of a retelling, Haman himself gets changed more than any other character.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (9:41)

Yeah, those are some pretty big changes, right? These are not just like little tiny tweaks, which is very interesting to understand in the Jewish texts. But you also talk about in the book that Haman also shows up in non Jewish literary traditions. So what, or at least kind of aspects of this show up in other places? So where else can we see sort of elements of Haman that are coming in?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (10:06)

Well, I mean, moving out of Judaism towards Christianity and then Islam. So obviously the Hebrew Bible is part of the Christian Bible and whatever version of it was translated and used by a Christian community will have affected the way people received Haman. But just as important is the fact that over the centuries, Christians have developed new ways of reading the biblical test, the biblical text. So you could read it typologically, finding in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament stories.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (10:37)

Find precursors to New Testament stories, or you could read the text allegorically. So finding a message in the Old Testament story that has a deeper theological significance than the plain meaning of the text. So people have rewritten the Book of Esther and through their translations, but they've also reread it over the centuries and in very particularly Christian ways. So that's one aspect of it. But beyond the Judeo Christian tradition and the Esther context, for Haman, he also turns up in the Quran, which takes him in a completely different direction, takes him into the Muslim world, into Islamic traditions. I don't know if you want me to plunge into that straight away.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (11:18)

Yeah, why not?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (11:19)

Sure. Well, look, until now things were complicated, but I recommend that you and your listeners buckle up because it's going to get a little bit bumpier. Now your question about Haman in other traditions and in the Quran particularly implies that he is the same Haman. And a man by the name of Haman does show up in the Quran six times. But not everybody agrees that it's the same Haman because in the Quran he features an ancient Egypt alongside a pharaoh of Moses's era. So for many, especially modern Muslims, this Haman happens to share a name with a villain of the Book of Esther. But that's it. It's just a homonym. Just like not all Mirandas are the same person. But most scholars and including pre modern Muslim authors disagree with this and assume that the two Hammons are one and the same. But they just have to explain how he arrived in Egypt, having began in Persia. And that's a whole different story. But I guess the question is, what's going on here? Did the Quran get its facts wrong, as many anti Islamic sort of Christian polemicists over the centuries have argued? Or did the Quran get its facts right and Esther is just a historical novella whose contents can't really be taken as a historical yardstick? Or did the Quran miraculously know that there was a Haman in ancient Egypt that nobody knew about until hieroglyphs were deciphered? And that has taken on a life of its own as a theory, because all over the Internet now you have different attempts to prove that Haman's character in the Quran is actually a proof that the Quran is from God. Because a prophet in 7th century Arabia could not have known that an ancient Egyptian character by this name.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (13:00)

Was significant.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (13:02)

Until about 200 years ago, hieroglyphs were deciphered. So the fact that Haman or somebody by the name of Haman occurs in the Quran can take us in all sorts of directions. And it has. And that has just made my task more complicated but more rewarding for it.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (13:19)

I mean, we like complexity, right? It's really fascinating to understand. So thank you for telling us about the Quranic element there.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (13:29)

Is there anything further about the kind of portrayal of Haman in the Old Testament, the Christian Bible? Anything else we want to touch on there before we look at maybe some other influences too?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (13:39)

No, except that every reader and every community will do something else with the text. So even if the text isn't changing and you have two different communities reading the same translation with the same exegetical traditions, you still can't control what people do with this in their own mind. So we'll still find a lot of diversity amongst the Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities throughout history precisely because this is sacred scripture and this is not just a story that's told before bedtime to children. This is something that if you're a believer, you matters intensely. So getting this right and understanding the meaning behind it is something that deserves our interest as readers. Whatever the religion throughout history, and that, of course, is affected by the period and the region in which somebody's reading the text and imagining how it plugs into their own background and needs.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (14:35)

What about if it is read as a sort of bedtime story? What if, like, do. What sorts of ways might we see links between this Haman story that is showing up in these different religious traditions and kind of the way it might be showing up or pieces of it are showing up, or influences from outside religious traditions? So if we're talking about like ancient Persian stories or Hellenistic influences, are there links there?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (15:01)

Wow, that's a really interesting question. I mean, it's not really trendy nowadays to speak of influences of traditions on each other, but I certainly know what you mean. And knowing that there were multiple versions of Esther, a variety of languages, means that we have to contextualize each of them historically and geographically. So the Septuagint is from the Hellenistic kind of culture, and it definitely displays Hellenistic sensibilities. So, for instance, Haman in that version is an evil Macedonian agent sent to overthrow the Persian Empire. And that's what spoke to people at the time, to the original audience of that translation. And it's. That's important not only because the Greek, Persian political rivalry was the backdrop, but also because it makes Haman culpable by Hellenistic standards. He's a kind of hostile foreign actor, whereas in the Hebrew Bible, by contrast, he plots to exterminate the Jews but he fails to do so. So his eventual execution is not really justifiable to a Hellenistic audience who is expecting kind of a more logical or.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (16:07)

Kind of philosophically sound equation between the crime and the punishment. And similarly, we can detect the kind of literary fingerprints of ancient Persian novellas on the Hebrew version or even on the Septuagint, which also emerged from the Parthian period. I don't want to get into too many details and bore people with different periods of Persian history, but there are Persian literary influences on the Septuagint as well, as well as Babylonian and Elamite themes and phrases and other details that you can identify in the Hebrew Old Testament version. So people with a literary eye will detect the kind of mythological qualities of the story because there's so much there.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (16:56)

That just plugs into the kind of mythological repertoire of ancient cultures.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (17:03)

The Cinderella.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (17:06)

Aspect of it. An Orphanus turns out to be the queen of Persia, and the court intrigues appear before and after in the same region in the near east, in the kind of Greater Persia and Babylonia and the 1001 Nights and so on. So if somebody has a literary eye, they will read this instinctively as bedtime story. But the fact that this bedtime story, so to speak, passed through the.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (17:35)

Different hoops necessary to become canonized as part of scripture have put it on a different bookshelf altogether. And now it's on the library of Sacred Stories. And therefore people who are not necessarily literarily trained, but are more theologically trained picked up the story 2000 years ago and developed it. And I processed it in different ways.

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Dr. Miranda Melcher (20:07)

That is very interesting to understand. And yes, I know I just asked you a very complicated question, but thank you for giving us a sense of kind of where we might see some of those connections which you've now mapped out for us across a number of different traditions, which is helpful, especially from the kind of literary analysis point of view. And as you said, the community's reading this from their different perspectives. If we look then at the subtitle of your book, right, we've talked a bit about kind of Haman the character, but if we think of it as a biography, you've told us a bit about the extent to which he may or may not be real. But even if we put aside the like, was he a physical human you could poke at some point? Even if we think of the biography as the character, can we construct a biography? Or do we just sort of see him turn up at this one moment and we don't really know about like his, the idea of his early life or his family or his background. Like, can we make a biography of any kind?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (21:04)

Well, that was the key question for me before I embarked on a project. And eventually I did try to write a biography, but I did in two separate ways. So on the one hand, I sought to describe the usual aspects of Haman's life that one expects to find his biography? Where did he come from? What do we know about his family and friends? What was his career path? How did he die? And I answer these questions on the basis of the various traditions about Haman that Jews, Christians and Muslims and others have developed throughout history. So there is a biography for somebody who takes him from within these traditions as a historical character. They will now find what they want to know about his context, his background, and what happened to him when he died. But on the other hand, I've also, at least from my perspective, more importantly, sought to chart as far as possible Haman's life as a literary character. So how do these traditions about him develop in different regions and periods of history? And what can we learn from the ways in which Haman's story changes about the communities that made these changes? So, in a way, sure, the book is about Haman, but it's also an excuse to tell the story of the near east over the past 2,500 years through the case study of a character whose story was passed around from the ancient near east to the modern West. So we make stops along the way and explain how Haman in one community changes because of what's happening historically in that period and amongst those people.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (22:29)

Do you want to tell us more about what we can construct of a biography of him?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (22:33)

Well, the biography of a living and breathing Haman.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (22:40)

I, I include a chapter called Haman's DNA in that I try to identify those historical characters who I think served as the basis for the character who turns up in the Hebrew Bible as Haman in the Esther story. And I do think that those are real people who we can identify whose lives we can describe on the basis of Persian sources and Greek sources from the period, in some cases pre Persian sources that kind of added a little bit of flavor and color to these historical characters and events. But at the end of the day, we can't really prove any of this. I'm just trying to reconstruct a puzzle. I put it on the table for those who are interested in that kind of detective work. But on the whole, what we're really dealing with are those details of Haman's life as a vizier, how he rose to that rank, what he did beforehand, what his childhood was like, his parents, his siblings, his mother in law. I mean, she must have had an impact on his life and so on and so forth. So I do kind of dutifully go through those characters and those categories, but not because I believe that these are the historical events and details and the data behind Haman, the historical figure. But because for people reading from within these traditions, those are the traditions that count. Those are the details that come from within the authoritative traditions of each religion. And to that extent, for the millions, if not billions of people who take Haman as a historical character, whether they're Jews and Christians or Muslims, they will find their data that they would consider to be historical for Haman as a real person.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (24:23)

Yeah. And you've listed there kind of a number of aspects of his life that you talk about in the book, but kind of up to him being Vizier, background, family, you know, key relatives, all that sort of stuff that makes sense to cover. And of course, it therefore also makes sense to cover his death, too. What I was intrigued by is that his death is a whole chapter of your book. So why so much focus there?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (24:46)

Well, yeah, that's. Instinctively, you would wonder why I would spend so much time in his death, but then really just reflecting the importance that his death has had since Esther was circulated. And it's. I mean, actually, Haman's death is probably the most significant aspect of his life because it's celebrated every year in Jewish Purim festivities. And the ways in which different communities choose to punish, quote, unquote, Haman every year. These ways offer us a sort of anthropological window onto each community. And whether he's hanged or burnt in effigy or beaten or eaten or whatever it is, these things tell us about local cultures. And there's often a deeper significance to these customs than may be apparent to a casual reader. So what I try to do is uncover the significance of a tradition whenever that's possible. So when someone's burning Haman and effigy, what did burning mean in that community at that period and in that region of history? And usually it's kind of surprising. It's not just, well, I want him dead, so I'll burn him. The same thing goes for eating Haman's ears or Haman's pockets. In Yiddish, it's called hamantashen. So you might see Jews in Western countries on Purim eating little triangles that represent Haman's pockets or ears. What does that mean? To eat the ears or pockets of a villain. And there's a surprisingly deep association from 3,000 years ago until now of eating parts of villains and what this means. But I won't do it justice by going into each of these things kind of in a sentence here and there. I would just point out that there's so much to. So much living tradition to unpack that it it turned into a. Perhaps the longest chapter of the book. But I personally find it also the most interesting because once again, if somebody is faced with.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (26:35)

A character who. Whom they hate, what they do to that character tells you so much about the person and much less about the character, because he could just be a pantomime villain. But how someone chooses to punish that villain tells us a lot about the community who's doing the punishing. So I found that fascinating.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (26:53)

It definitely tells us so much by looking at those particular instances. And in fact, it's also in that sort of sense of like, what does it tell us about the community to look at something else, not just burning Haman and effigy, but kind of actually looking at the Book of Esther more broadly, because as you mentioned right at the beginning, today it's kind of seen as like a default part of the Jewish calendar, for instance. Right. Having all of these traditions of the Hamentaschen and things like that. But you discuss in your book that Esther has actually been contested as being kind of a thing to have this level of importance in the past. So when was it sort of talked about as, like, maybe this isn't something we should do? Who was having these qualms about it, like, when was Esther a lot less accepted, perhaps, than it is now?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (27:41)

Yeah, that's also a big question. And even originally when the book was canonized amongst Jews a couple thousand years ago, the way I put it is that he kind of rolled under the closing garage door, sort of like in a Hollywood film. This was not something that was taken as a given. It was highly contested. And I think the problem is that different communities throughout history have been troubled by Esther's contents. There's just no two ways about that. And obviously one's access to the story depends on the version they read. But each version presents its own challenges. So Jewish readers of the Hebrew Bible wondered why a story about a court intrigue in a beauty contest and one that didn't even mention God, prayer, prophetic visions or the like, deserved a place on the scriptural bookshelf next to Israelite prophets or the books of the Torah and so on. And Christian readers of Esther, in whatever version, might wonder why Esther's contents seem so out of line with the New Testament's messages. So, for instance, Esther relates how after Haman was executed, some 75,000 non Jews were also killed throughout the empire. And aren't we told in the New Testament to love our enemy or to turn the other cheek? I mean, what's going on here? There have also been ways in which people felt uncomfortable or objected to the Purim celebrations. So for instance, in the 5th century BC, there are.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (29:04)

Tales or actual occasions in which we're told that Jews provocatively burned a crucified effigy of Haman in Christian lands. So that must not have been a very popular thing to do. And you can imagine Christians observing this, not being happy about the choice of punishment for the Haman effigy. And in general, Purim celebrations have often been associated with copious consumption of alcohol and Talmud. It's stipulated that Jesus must get drunk on her. So in general, somebody, a reader of the Bible seeking inspiring spiritual messages, could be forgiven for coming away from Esther disappointed, if not empty handed altogether. So there have consistently throughout history been people who've wondered why this book is in the Bible, what we're supposed to make of it, and whether we should still be using it as kind of spiritual nourishment, or just turning to books of the Bible that have more to recommend them. And it's not a simple question. And Even in the 20th and 21st centuries, there were people who objected to Esther and to Purim celebrations because they clash with modern sensibilities.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (30:15)

In some ways, that's really interesting to understand kind of how recently some of these questions have been raised. I do want to go back to the burning and effigy bit of things because that's obviously very dramatic and the way in which it's not just this one specific story where kind of Haman is a villain term, it's sort of been used as a homophone, but also kind of more broadly as like just a general. When you want to say something is villainous. Right. The name starts to kind of get used more broadly within some communities. So first I wonder if we can talk about when that started to happen within Jewish communities. So like used to say that these other Jews are bad and like Haman, when do we sort of see that? Why? What are the sort of circumstances where that would happen?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (31:04)

Yeah, that's, that's a great question. So basically, as I'm sure you in the audience knows, there are many villains in the Hebrew Bible and Nebuchadnezzar and Nimrod and Pharaoh, there are other villains who could have been chosen as the kind of byword for one's rival or one's enemy. But Haman was chosen amongst other reasons, because he wasn't the king, he wasn't a ruler, he was a functionary who represented the kingdom and people in a, in a village or in a city. Somewhere will come across representatives of the king, but not usually the king himself. So when somebody had an extortionate tax collector, they could call him Haman but not Pharaoh, because they obviously the tax collector isn't Pharaoh, he's the Haman. So as a kind of the choice villain to use as a label for one's enemies, that's probably why Haman was more popular than other Hebrew Bible villains, even though he never really ended up committing any crimes and he was a failed woman. But when did Jews start using Haman against other Jews? Well, I guess this started in the second Temple period. So the first few centuries before the Christian era, when certain Jews who were troubled by Esther's contents decided to rewrite the book, not in a translation, but in a separate story based on Esther, but kind of cleaned up with none of the deficiencies that Esther had. And some of these stories talk about an empire and a villain and Jews being threatened, but when they talk about the villain, they talk about a Hellenized Jew, a Jew who's sort of supporting the enemy or going culturally to the other side rather than being a traditional Jews adopting Hellenism as a Jew. So this happened in the mid second century BC in a book called the Second Maccabees where a Hellenized Jew by the name of Menelaus was deemed to be the Haman character of the story. And this happens again and again throughout Jewish history, whether it's conversos Jews who during the Inquisition, Inquisition dubbed Christianity. So Jews would refer to that.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (33:13)

So to speak, traitor as the Haman of the day. And there are also splits within Judaism, such as scripturalists called Karaites who decided that the Bible is all they need. They can just ignore the rabbis and interpret the Bible on its own through their own glasses, without going through the kind of the, the sieve of Jewish tradition, a bit like Protestants. And they just became the internal enemy for the Rabbanite Jews, the kind of more traditional Jews and Jews who were, Rabbi referred to Karaites as the Hamans and so on. So within Judaism this is something that started before there were Christianities and Islams, but this continued throughout Jewish history and amongst Christians again they adopt the Esther story from the Hebrew Bible in whatever version. There were of course splits. And I think the main point is that in late antiquity, Jews living under the Eastern Roman Empire described Hammond as a Roman. So when as you can imagine, the Protestants break away and see the Pope in Rome as the leader of the other side, they have this ready made repository of traditions about Haman the Roman that they could tap into and use. So in sermons about the Book of Esther, Protestant preachers could use.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (34:36)

Veiled or even not veiled references to the Pope as Haman. And again, this happens with Guy Fawkes in the uk, you have conspiracy, a Catholic conspiracy to overthrow Protestant rule and to burn Houses of Parliament.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (34:53)

And the foiling of this plot is enshrined in Guy Fawkes Night, which involves, of course, burning an effigy of the villain, as happens often in Purim celebrations. So that's an internal Christian debate with an internal Hammon, just as there were the internal Jewish Hammans. But on the whole, more often than not, we'll find Jews deploying the Haman label against non Jews, mostly Christians, throughout history, because the labels would sting for somebody who knows the Esther story, whereas a Muslim might not know what the associations of Haman were for Jews. So calling a Muslim Haman would almost not really have any meaning. But, yeah, it's usually an interfaith rather than an intra faith label of opprobrium and kind of a curse word.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (35:40)

Interesting, though, to see it used kind of in both of those contexts because of the shared tradition. Right. As you said, it wouldn't work as an insult if the person being insulted doesn't know what it means. So that kind of in and of itself is evidence that this is not just a Jewish tradition, but crosses beyond that as well. So thank you for excavating Haman for us across different texts and different times. Is there anything further you want to tell us about the book before I ask you about future work?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (36:08)

No, I think I would just add one further point to the previous topic, which is that, interestingly, most Protestants would read a version of the Hebrew Bible. In other words, they would read a translation of the Hebrew Bible, not of the Septuagint. And because the Haman that they would read about was so different from the Catholic Haman who's based on the Septuagint, they would be using this term as a label, imagining one thing, and the Catholics would hear this label and imagine something else. So even at that level, Haman was creating all sorts of mischief, and he's just a curious character wherever he goes. And that's probably why, even though there's only three pages worth of Haman material in Scripture itself, the book is something like 300 pages. And again, this has been a great adventure, a great journey for me, and I hope that readers also find it to be a readable story and one that's surprisingly diverse and interesting.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (37:09)

Yeah, there's definitely a lot going on. I can imagine how interesting a journey it would have been to kind of piece all of this together. So I'm very curious to know what you might be working on now that this is done. What have you set your sights on next?

Dr. Adam Silverstein (37:22)

Well, I mean, I've enjoyed this so much. Maybe I'll do more podcasts. But as with any big project, once it's done, there's a lot of material and a lot of ideas that kind of ended up on the cutting room floor like academic sawdust. So I'll probably have to do something with those things just to clear my desk. But after that I might branch into more villains or go in a different direction altogether. But the dust hasn't settled entirely, so I'll see where this takes me.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (37:50)

That's very fair. And while you are dealing with the remnants that didn't quite make it into the book, of course listeners can read what did get included, which is rather a lot in a biography published by Princeton University Press in 2025 on all sorts of things to investigate there. So, Adam, thank you so much for telling us about it and joining me on the podcast.

Dr. Adam Silverstein (38:12)

Thank you so much for having me.