Tag: Esther

Free Download Ann M. Little, "The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright "
English | ISBN: 0300218214 | 2016 | 304 pages | AZW3 | 2 MB
An eye-opening biography of a woman whose life intersected with three distinct cultures in eighteenth-century America: colonial New England, French Canadian, and Native American

Free Download Gabriel Fischer Hornung, "Esther against Joseph’s Backdrop: The Theology and History of an Intertextual Relationship "
English | ISBN: 3111214133 | 2024 | 170 pages | PDF | 1094 KB
An examination of MT Esther’s relationship to the Joseph story, this study employs recent advances in author-oriented biblical intertextuality to address the debate concerning the religious purpose of the Scroll. While previous scholarship has seen Esther’s divine silence indicating God’s hidden hand, the characters’ or readers’ quiet faiths, or the secular concerns of an ancient Jewish nationalism, key aspects of Esther’s allusive character illustrate how the book purposefully constructs a theology of divine absence. As good-looking Israelites continue to rise in foreign courts to deliver themselves and their people from imminent dangers, the patterns God initiated in the Egyptian past are shown to extend into the Persian present even when the divine remains out of sight. Since this diachronically-oriented analysis suggests this theological interest was developed by Esther’s authors, it engages with Esther’s ancient Greek witnesses to demonstrate that the MT redactors altered an earlier version of the Scroll to position the Hebrew Megillah alongside Joseph’s instructive backdrop. By attending to these historical and interpretive issues, this work thus speaks to both Scroll scholarship and the study of inner-biblical allusions.

Free Download Ariel Clark Silver, "The Book of Esther and the Typology of Female Transfiguration in American Literature"
English | ISBN: 149856478X | 2017 | 240 pages | EPUB | 490 KB
The enduring search for female salvation in American literature is first expressed through typology, an interpretive framework that pairs type with antitype, historical scriptural promise with future spiritual fulfillment. When Cotton Mather invokes the typos of Esther in Ornaments of the Daughters of Zion, a Puritan conduct book, he offers a female type of divine wisdom, authority and force. In the biblical Book of Esther, Esther acts as a female type of wisdom and redemption, but her story also engages the larger history of Hebrew salvation. In nineteenth-century America, Margaret Fuller seeks to extend the spiritual claims once made by Mather and establish the role of the divine female in the salvation of American culture and society. Fuller supplants the type of male sacrifice with a type of female transfiguration in works such as Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Nathaniel Hawthorne then transforms these iconoclastic ideals into literary life by engaging the multi-faceted figure of Esther as a typos of female redemption and salvation in "Legends of the Province House," The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun. Through his female characters – Esther Dudley, Hester Prynne, Zenobia, and Miriam – he seeks to fulfill the divine destiny of the American woman. Hawthorne discovers, however, that female redemption is followed by revenge, as Esther turns from saving her people to ensuring an end to their oppression. When Henry Adams later revives Esther Dudley in his novel Esther, he rejects male redemption for the American woman. In Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel, and The Education of Henry Adams, Adams envisions an independent, eternal woman who can rival the political, scientific, artistic, and theological power of men. The movement from male to female salvation is achieved when the terms of female redemption are transformed and the American woman is established as her own source of divine wisdom, power, retribution, and force. The typology of female transfiguration in America is fulfilled by Fuller, Hawthorne, and Adams through the promise extended by the type of Esther.

Free Download Isaac Kalimi, "The Book of Esther between Judaism and Christianity"
English | ISBN: 1009266128 | 2023 | 350 pages | PDF | 12 MB
The book of Esther is one of the most challenging books in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, not only because of the difficulty of understanding the book itself in its time, place, and literary contexts, but also for the long and tortuous history of interpretation it has generated in both Jewish and Christian traditions. In this volume, Isaac Kalimi addresses both issues. He situates ‘traditional’ literary, textual, theological, and historical-critical discussion of Esther alongside comparative Jewish and Christian interpretive histories, showing how the former serves the latter. Kalimi also demonstrates how the various interpretations of the Book of Esther have had an impact on its reception history, as well as on Jewish-Christian relations. Based on meticulous and comprehensive analysis of all available sources, Kalimi’s volume fills a gap in biblical, Jewish, and Christian studies and also shows how and why the Book of Esther became one of the central books of Judaism and one of the most neglected books in Christianity.

Free Download Ron Lindo Jr., "Literary Allusions in Esther: A Study on the Convergence of Intertexts and Narrative "
English | ISBN: 1433192160 | 2023 | 168 pages | PDF, EPUB | 8 + 2 MB
Literary Allusions in Esther: A Study on the Convergence of Intertexts and Narrative　examines the robust intertextual nature of MT Esther. Its textual landscape is filled with a plethora of allusions to other texts scattered throughout the Old Testament canon.