The Synoptic Book of Esther

BIBLICAL POLEMIC FROM ENVELOPEBOOKSThe Book of Esther (the Megillah) is the last book in the Bible and one of only two biblical works that makes no mention of God (The Song of Songs is the other). Why is that? Why would the editors of the Bible include a story about the survival of the Jewish people in the face of almost certain destruction and not publicly attribute it to divine providence?In this new and revelatory analysis, the designer and critic Stephen Games looks closely at the curiosities of the book as a piece of literature—at its changes of style and tone, at its inconsistencies and redundancies, and at the discrepancies in its writing—and identifies two different authors with two agendas and not a lot of common ground. One is terse and businesslike, the other garrulous and detailed. Games calls the first of these M and the second of them E, and speculates that they can be equated with the two principal characters, Mordecai and Esther, even if Mordecai and Esther cannot be shown to be the actual authors. In a dynamic introductory essay, he argues that from the very start of the book we see two separate stories diverge. Then, as the heroes of the story fight to save the Jewish people from the prospect of genocide, their literary avatars become locked in a battle to tell their own tale, claim that they and not the other played the more decisive role in orchestrating Jewish survival, and either reinforce or challenge gendered structures of power. Apart from being an account of an existential threat to the Jews living under Xerxes’s rule, the Book of Esther is shown to be a playing out of a literary struggle exactly contemporary with Aeschylus’s earliest surviving play nearly 2,500 years ago (alsoi about Persians) and fifty years before Aristophanes’s political comedy (Lysistrata) about another woman’s efforts to end a war. Games offers a radical new reading of the Megillah and a startlingly original way of representing the text’s literary conflicts in visual form. The book includes his notes and also the Septuagint (Old Greek) text for comparison, with its six extra sections, rejected by the Jewish establishment 2,000 years ago.

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