Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible: Esther

By Sidnie White Crawford

This extract from the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible provides Crawford’s introduction to and concise commentary on Esther. The Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible presents, in nontechnical language, the best of modern scholarship on each book of the Bible, including the Apocrypha. Reader-friendly commentary complements succinct summaries of each section of the text and will be valuable to scholars, students, and general readers.
 
Rather than attempt a verse-by-verse analysis, these volumes work from larger sense units, highlighting the place of each passage within the overarching biblical story. Commentators focus on the genre of each text—parable, prophetic oracle, legal code, and so on—interpreting within the historical and literary context.
 
The volumes also address major issues within each biblical book—including the range of possible interpretations—and refer readers to the best resources for further discussions.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jun 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781467453639

Book preview

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EERDMANS

COMMENTARY on the BIBLE

Esther

Sidnie White Crawford

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

© 2003 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

All rights reserved

Originally published as part of Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible

This edition published 2019.

ISBN 978-1-4674-5363-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Esther

Introduction

Commentary

The Deposition of Queen Vashti (1:1–22)

Esther Becomes Queen (2:1–18)

Mordecai Discovers the Eunuchs’ Plot (2:19–23)

Haman’s Plot to Destroy the Jews (3:1–15)

Mordecai Turns to Esther (4:1–17)

Esther Goes to the King (5:1–8)

Haman Builds a Gallows (5:9–14)

Haman’s Humiliation (6:1–13)

Esther’s Second Banquet (6:14–8:2)

The Undoing of Haman’s Plot (8:3–17)

The Battles (9:1–19)

The Letters of Purim (9:20–32)

Appendix concerning Mordecai (10:1–3)

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Preface

No one familiar with the Bible in any degree needs to be told that it is a remarkable volume. Its documents and traditions span a period of at least a thousand years. It contains the sacred scriptures of two of the world’s major religions, Judaism (what Christians call the Old Testament) and Christianity, and is the lifeblood of each. In and through its words hundreds of thousands have heard, and still hear, the Word of God addressing them personally. The Bible has informed and infused Western culture to such an extent that the foundations, formative traditions, character, and values of Western society cannot be understood without it. Nations have been built on foundational principles drawn from it. Much of the world’s greatest art, music, and literature cannot be adequately appreciated without a good knowledge of the Bible. It has been the source and inspiration for countless acts of quiet heroism and lives of sacrificial service—though, paradoxically, many of its texts have also been used to justify acts of unimaginable horror and systems of barbarous intolerance. And in many parts of the world, particularly in Africa and South America, where the Christian churches are growing rapidly, the Bible is being rediscovered and read in new and exciting ways.

A striking and equally familiar feature of the Bible is the rich diversity of types of writing within it—law codes, historical narratives, poetry, psalms and proverbs, prophetic oracles, apocalyptic visions, gospels, and epistles. Each of these genres requires detailed study to unfold its riches, and all of the sixty-six individual writings—not to mention the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha—have given rise to numerous commentaries and special studies. Indeed, a further measure of the Bible’s importance is that it has resulted in far more secondary literature than has any other single or composite volume in history. In consequence, the beginning student or study group that wants to give the Bible serious attention can quickly be overwhelmed by such an embarrassing abundance of riches. The sheer disparity between the Bible’s one volume and all that has been written about it is mind-boggling. At the same time, many briefer treatments of biblical books and themes are written at an overly simplistic level; they neither wrestle with the complexity of many texts, nor penetrate very far into the profundity of others, nor show enough awareness of the diversity of interpretations possible at many points or of the challenges and benefits of much modern scholarship. Despite its age, biblical studies is a fast-moving discipline with new discoveries, angles