Finished reading: Esther and Her Elusive God by John Anthony Dunne 📚

A thorough debunking of the mainstream interpretation of Esther. Once you stop assuming Esther and Mordecai are paragons of virtue, and you quit trying to give complicated explanations for the absence of God or religious devotion, things start falling into place. You can read with the grain of the story. My main complaint is that Dunne left himself little space to answer the most interesting question raised by his study: namely, what is the theological significance of the book of Esther’s secularity? He does explore the question briefly in the last few pages, but I would’ve like more. Nevertheless, I do feel emboldened, thanks to Dunne’s work, to depart from the common ways of reading Esther, and to probe more deeply the strangeness of the text as it stands.