The hectic enthusiast who inspires Daniel Deronda with his passionate ideas is evidently a reflection in modern literature of the Mordecai of Scripture. It must be admitted that the reflection approaches a caricature. The dreaminess and morbid excitability of George Eliot's consumptive hero have no counterpart in the wise, strong Mentor of Queen Esther; and the English writer's agnosticism has led her to exclude all the Divine elements of the Jewish faith, so that on her pages the sole object of Israelite devotion is the race of Israel. But the very extravagance of the portraiture keenly accentuates what is, after all, the most remarkable trait in the original Mordecai. We are not in a position to deny that this man had a living faith in the God of his fathers; we are simply ignorant as to what his attitude towards religion was, because the author of the Book of Esther draws a veil over the religious relations of all his characters. Still the one thing prominent and pronounced in Mordecai is patriotism, devotion to Israel, the expenditure of thought and effort on the protection of his threatened people. The first mention of the name of Mordecai introduces a hint of his national connections. We read, "There was a certain Jew in Shushan the palace, whose name was Mordecai, the son of Jair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish, a Benjamite; who had been carried away from Jerusalem with the captives which had been carried away with Jeconiah king of Judah, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away."[266] Curious freaks of exegesis have been displayed in dealing with this passage. It has been thought that the Kish mentioned in it is no other than the father of Saul, in which case the ages of the ancestors of Mordecai must rival those of the antediluvians; and it has been suggested that Mordecai is here represented as one of the original captives from Jerusalem in the reign of Jeconiah, so that at the time of Xerxes he must have been a marvellously old man, tottering on the brink of the grave. On these grounds the genealogical note has been treated as a fanciful fiction invented to magnify the importance of Mordecai. But there is no necessity to take up any such position. It would be strange to derive Mordecai from the far-off Benjamite farmer Kish, who shines only in the reflected glory of his son, whereas we have no mention of Saul himself. There is no reason to say that another Kish may not have been found among the captives. Then it is quite possible to dispose of the second difficulty by connecting the relative clause at the beginning of verse 6--"who had been carried away"--with the nearest antecedent in the previous sentence--viz., "Kish the Benjamite." If we remove the semi-colon from the end of verse 5, the clauses will run on quite smoothly and there will be no reason to go back to the name of Mordecai for the antecedent of the relative; we can read the words thus--"Kish the Benjamite who had been carried away," etc.