Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

Author’s preface

Introduction

1. Some parties and their aftermath (1:1–22)

2. Providence in the passive voice (2:1–23)

3. Power and corruption in high places (3:1–15)

4. Risking all (4:1–17)

5. A tale of two banquets (5:1–14)

6. A funny thing happened (6:1–13)

7. An awkward dinner (6:14 – 7:10)

8. Revoking the irrevocable (8:1–17)

9. Days of deliverance (9:1–19)

10. Remembering deliverance (9:20 – 10:3)

(From the) Author’s preface

My interest in the book of Esther came about in a rather coincidental way, something appropriate to a book which makes much of coincidence as a means of seeing God at work in our world. In 1990 my wife and I went with the Australian Baptist Missionary Society to Zimbabwe where I was to teach Biblical Studies at the Theological College of Zimbabwe. One of the courses I taught there was an introduction to exegesis, and on the basis of student feedback we decided to give one hour a week to the study of an actual text. The question was which one? Reasoning that I had a ten-week teaching term, so that roughly one chapter a week would be appropriate, and that a narrative was less likely to pose too many major problems, I decided that Esther would suit admirably.

At the time, I had never studied Esther in any detail, though I assumed (rightly as it happened) that none of my students would have done so either, meaning that there would be fewer preconceptions that would impede the actual process of exegesis. In many ways it was therefore a rather pragmatic decision on the basis of a specific set of circumstances, but it was also an inspired one and the weekly sessions on Esther became a highlight of the programme. It also inspired me to study the book further, looking for a while at Esther as the basis for doctoral work, but continuing to study it even when my research took other directions. Since I was frequently moonlighting as a preacher at churches in and around Bulawayo I also took the opportunity to begin exploring exactly how one could communicate what this book had to say for Christians in the midst of increasingly difficult circumstances. When we moved to the Baptist College of Southern Africa in Johannesburg I needed a reading text for the second-year Hebrew students and again drew on Esther since its higher than average number of feminine forms forces students to attend to their parsing. But this made me more aware than before of the subtlety with which the story is told, even though at times it appears to verge more on farce than anything else.

Since then it is a text to which I have turned at a variety of times. I took the opportunity to preach through the whole book with the evening congregation at St Ives Baptist Church in Sydney in 1998, in an extended reading of the story (using the divisions of the text employed here). Several congregation members admitted that they would not read the chapter we were considering until after the service because they were waiting to find out what happened next and did not want to spoil the surprise of the sermon, but then would read it again in light of the exposition. This showed me more clearly than before just how well this story is told and why our own preaching of it must help our congregations be drawn into it if they are to appreciate what it has to say. Most recently, I worked through Esther in a series of talks presented as the 2009 Bible Study at Dronfield Baptist Church – an opportunity to develop and polish my thinking on this generally neglected book.

Telling this story reminds me that my understanding of the text has been formed in community; that this is a story to be told and retold so that believers together can help one another to come to a richer understanding of it. Students and colleagues at various institutions and congregants in a range of churches and settings have all contributed to my understanding of this story and its significance for us today. Studying the Bible is not, finally, something that happens solely as scholars work away in their studies (as vital as this is) but as we work together to hear what God is saying through his Word. Likewise, my family has continued to support and sustain me in my work, and my wife Lynne continues to exercise the gift of encouragement in numerous ways. …

David G. Firth

(From the) Introduction

By any assessment, Esther is a rather strange book to find in the Bible. Not only is it, along with Daniel, the only book of the Bible to be set entirely outside of the Promised Land, it also shows no interest in that land, unlike Daniel who made it the point of orientation for his prayer. More than that, Esther is the only book in the Bible which definitely does not mention God, though this has not stopped people trying to find references to God hidden in acrostics in the text. For example, the successive words in the phrase, ‘let the king and Haman come today’, in Hebrew start with the letters that make up the name commonly written as Yahweh, God’s covenant name in the Old Testament. Somewhat more ingeniously, the last letter of each word in the phrase ‘all this is worth nothing to me’ also contain the letters of the divine name, though this time we are required to read the words backwards to find it. As impressive as such things might seem, it is unlikely that these are anything more than accidents of composition. Since the letters required to make the name Yahweh are actually very common we would need to have evidence that the phenomenon is significantly more common in the book of Esther than it is to believe that there is anything intentional in it, quite apart from the question of why we would be expected to observe an acrostic of the last letter of each word that we have to read backwards even to notice that it is there. In fact, as we shall see, the book of Esther not only fails to mention God at all, but it also seems to go out of its way to avoid any obviously religious language, so that attempts to hide God within the language of the text would actually be counter to its purposes. None of this should be taken as meaning that the book has no theological intention. On the contrary it has a developed theology, but it is a theology which operates precisely because it does not mention God directly. It is this paradox which both makes Esther such a strange book within the Bible and yet at the same time one which is of great importance for those of us living in post-Christendom, where we need to live out our faith in a world where we often cannot name God directly. Thus, what might seem on the surface to be a rather odd book is actually one that invites us to reflect on what it is to know God within this world – a world where the miraculous is rare and yet in which the faithful continue to experience the reality of God’s presence.

1. Which Esther?

Before considering other matters we have to start with one basic but perhaps unusual question. Which book of Esther should we read? The importance of this emerges from the fact that three different versions of the book have come down to us, each with its own emphases and character. Our first decision must therefore be to determine which of these stories we need to interpret.

The best-known version of Esther, and the one represented in most editions of the Bible today, is that found in the Hebrew text which underlies the Protestant Old Testament. This version of the story does not mention God, and seems to go out of its way to avoid mention of religious themes and practices other than fasting. The difficulty of a text which does not mention God is addressed by the next-best-known version of Esther. This is a Greek version which includes some extra passages known as Additions A–F. These additions are included in printed additions of the Apocrypha as a separate work known as ‘The Additions to Esther’, although no manuscript exists which does not have them included within this version of the book. These additions include extensive religious material so that the book now commences with Mordecai’s dream (Addition A) in which God reveals to him what is about to happen, as well as prayers and the like. But once we remove the additions we discover that this is more or less a translation of the story as it appears in the Hebrew text. Since the additions are clearly secondary and distract us from the central narrative we can discount them beyond noting that they show an early concern with the book’s apparent lack of reference to God.

The third form of the Esther story that has come down to us is in an alternative Greek text. This appears to be a translation of a somewhat different Hebrew original. This form of the story is much less accessible to most readers today, but Clines has helpfully produced both the Greek text and an English translation. The manuscripts we have of this version also include Additions A–F, but they are clearly not an original part of it. With these removed we are left with a story that is recognisably that of Esther but which has significant variations, possibly ending with Mordecai’s elevation at the end of chapter 8, meaning there is no link with Purim. Like the Hebrew form of Esther it probably does not mention God though it does mention prayer. For a variety of reasons, this is probably the earliest version of the story of Esther, but that the story existed in an earlier form does not make it more important for us. That slightly variant forms of the story existed is not in itself surprising as stories can be passed on for a variety of reasons – we only need to consider the way we often tell stories from our own experience to illustrate different issues to recognise this. But the Hebrew form of Esther was ultimately recognised as the canonical form, because its telling of the story was most appropriate. As such, although we will occasionally note variants from the other forms of the story, this exposition focuses on the book of Esther as it occurs in printed editions of the Bible, but without reference to the Additions.

2. Genre and purpose

Knowing that Esther might have been told in other ways helps us recognise some of the book’s key emphases, but it does not resolve the question of exactly what sort of literature this is. Asking a question like this means we are enquiring about the book’s genre, which we can define as that set of characteristics that define the way in which it is meant to be read and interpreted. At a most basic level, we recognise that we interpret prose and poetry differently from one another, but we also appreciate that we interpret different forms of prose differently too. Hence, we read a work of history differently from a work of fiction, but we don’t read all works of history or fiction in the same way. We would read a James Bond novel differently from Aesop’s fables, and both are different from Jesus’ parables. Now, the biblical writers did not generally work with the same sets of genres as we do today because genres vary across languages and cultures. But the biblical authors still chose the genres they did because they enabled them to communicate their message. Our task is to understand the genre employed so we can understand the message the biblical writers wanted to communicate.

At the risk of over-simplifying a complex debate, scholars have generally reached two basic views on the book’s genre, though a mediating position has emerged. The classical view was that Esther was a historical work, reflecting a deliverance of the Jews in Persia. But this view was radically challenged by Paton. Although not the first to do so, he systematically attacked it, highlighting a number of alleged historical inconsistencies (such as the fact that we know of no Jewish queen in Persia from other sources) and concluding that because of these factors Esther had to be a work of fiction. This has become the dominant critical view of the book. Yet it is fundamentally flawed because it assumes that ancient writers should follow our historical conventions rather than those of their time. This does not itself disprove Paton’s conclusion, merely that the argument itself is flawed, but it does mean that we need to approach the whole issue more carefully.

The basic alternative is to regard Esther as an historical work. It is certainly possible to link the events described in the book with other historical sources. This approach takes seriously the presence of certain features within the book which suggest historical intent, such as the reference to Mordecai in the Chronicles of Media and Persia, though it would help if we actually had a copy of this chronicle! But although we can draw on these sources, we still need to concede Clines’ point that archaeological information is only relevant if we can establish from the text that the book was written with an historical intent. In a sense, therefore, both those who have argued for the book’s historicity and those who have argued it is a work of fiction have made the same generic error of looking for external factors to determine the book’s genre rather than working from the hints provided by the text itself. ….