In this book the author attempts to unravel the original narratives which underlie the biblical Book of Esther. She reconstructs the contents of three non-Jewish narratives: A wedding story, in which the foreign beauty (Esther) takes the place of the disobedient queen, and two court narratives, telling the story of the rivalry between two courtiers at the Persian court. In exilic and postexilic times these basic narratives were merged into one topical and literarily well developed narrative, which expressed the problems connected with Jewish life in the diaspora. The author shows that this...