Purim, on the fourteenth of Adar, commemorates the deliverance recounted in the biblical Book of Esther: the frustration of a plot by Haman, minister of the Persian king, to destroy the Jews of the empire, through the courage of Queen Esther and her cousin Mordecai, so that the day appointed for slaughter became a day of rescue. In walled cities such as Jerusalem it is kept a day later, as Shushan Purim, following the book's own account of an extra day of deliverance in the capital.
The book is unusual in the Hebrew Bible for never naming God, and this is theologically central to the festival rather than incidental: Purim is understood as the model of hidden providence, deliverance worked not by open miracle but through the seeming coincidences of ordinary political events, the "hiddenness" caught in the tradition that Esther's name is linked to a Hebrew word for concealment. Historically, scholars generally read Esther as a novella rather than a chronicle, and the festival's riotous, carnival character is unlike that of the biblically commanded feasts, which is part of its distinct place in the year.