Esther against Joseph’s Backdrop
The Theology and History of an Intertextual Relationship
- 160 pages
- English
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Esther against Joseph’s Backdrop
The Theology and History of an Intertextual Relationship
About This Book
An examination of MT Esther's relationship to the Joseph story, this study employs recent advances in author-oriented biblical intertextuality to address the debate concerning the religious purpose of the Scroll. While previous scholarship has seen Esther's divine silence indicating God's hidden hand, the characters' or readers' quiet faiths, or the secular concerns of an ancient Jewish nationalism, key aspects of Esther's allusive character illustrate how the book purposefully constructs a theology of divine absence. As good-looking Israelites continue to rise in foreign courts to deliver themselves and their people from imminent dangers, the patterns God initiated in the Egyptian past are shown to extend into the Persian present even when the divine remains out of sight. Since this diachronically-oriented analysis suggests this theological interest was developed by Esther's authors, it engages with Esther's ancient Greek witnesses to demonstrate that the MT redactors altered an earlier version of the Scroll to position the Hebrew Megillah alongside Joseph's instructive backdrop. By attending to these historical and interpretive issues, this work thus speaks to both Scroll scholarship and the study of inner-biblical allusions.
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Table of contents
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- 1 Introduction: Currents in Scroll and Intertextual Scholarship
- Part One: The Allusive Megillah and the Scholarly Attempts to Understand It
- Part Two: Compositional and Structural Considerations
- Part Three: The Theology of Esther and Contrast of Daniel
- Subject Index
- Index of Secondary Authors
- Index of Biblical Passages