Description: What if the way the book of Esther has been taught to us in church and retold to us in films, cartoons, and romance novels has missed the original point of the story? Far from being models of piety and devotion, Esther and Mordecai seem indifferent to the faith of their ancestors. How then did this story become part of the Bible and gain the broad acceptance that it has? If the church should not neglect the story, how should it be read? Esther and Her Elusive God calls Christians to avoid the common attempts to make Esther more palatable and theological, and to reclaim this...

The authors of this volume explore various instances of theo-political visions of authoritative texts in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism, and Early Christianity, and as such offer a broader perspective on the topos, "sacred texts in their context." Instead of a narrow exploration of the "political intent" of a singular text or group of texts, the volume contains the treatment of a wide range of texts, out of different corpora, with their discrete contexts. Their juxtaposition, as well as that of the respective scholarly approaches of the essays, offers fresh insights on the matter. Each of...