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Updated: May 6, 2025
It is true that the earliest ritual reference to the wearing of masks on Purim dates from the year 1508, just within the Ghetto period. But this omission of earlier reference is surely an accident, In the Babylonian Sacaea, cited above, a feature of the revel was that men and women disguised themselves, a slave dressed up as king, while servants personated masters, and vice versa.
According to the historian Berosus, who as a Babylonian priest spoke with ample knowledge, there was annually celebrated in Babylon a festival called the Sacaea. It began on the sixteenth day of the month Lous, and lasted for five days, during which masters and servants changed places, the servants giving orders and the masters obeying them.
It seems worth suggesting that the mock king who was annually killed at the Babylonian festival of the Sacaea on the sixteenth day of the month Lous may have represented Tammuz himself.
Frazer cites some evidence for the early prevalence of the Purim bonfire; he argues strongly and persuasively in favor of the identification of Purim with the Babylonian feast of the Sacaea, a wild, extravagant bacchanalian revel, which, in the old Asiatic world, much resembled the Saturnalia of a later Italy. The theory is plausible, though it is not quite proven by Dr.
For the historian Berosus, who records the festival and its date, probably used the Macedonian calendar, since he dedicated his history to Antiochus Soter; and in his day the Macedonian month Lous appears to have corresponded to the Babylonian month Tammuz. If this conjecture is right, the view that the mock king at the Sacaea was slain in the character of a god would be established.
Frazer describes the far-back Babylonian festival of the Sacaea in which "a prisoner, condemned to death, was dressed in the king's robes, seated on the king's throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink and enjoy himself, and even to lie with the king's concubines." But at the end of the five days he was stripped of his royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled.
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