Bringing God into the Story of Esther

The Additions to Esther are six passages, preserved in the Greek version of the book, that are absent from the shorter Hebrew text of Esther in the Jewish and Protestant Bibles. The Hebrew book of Esther is famous for a striking peculiarity: it never once mentions God. The Greek additions decisively change that character. They supply a dream of Mordecai foreshadowing the events and its interpretation; the texts of the royal edicts, first against and then for the Jews; and, most importantly, fervent prayers of Mordecai and of Esther, in which the deliverance of the Jews is explicitly attributed to God and Esther expresses her horror at her position in a pagan court. The effect is to transform a book that could be read as a secular tale of court intrigue and national survival into an overtly religious narrative of divine providence. The additions were composed in Greek, probably in the second or first century BCE, as part of the Hellenistic Jewish reception of the Esther story.