Text, Canon and Value

In the Greek manuscripts the additions are woven into the narrative at their appropriate places, but when Jerome produced the Latin Vulgate he translated the Hebrew Esther and gathered the extra Greek material together at the end of the book, an arrangement that has shaped how they are printed since. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches receive the additions as deuterocanonical parts of Esther; Judaism and the Protestant tradition, following the Hebrew text, treat them as Apocrypha, and Protestant Bibles that include the Apocrypha print them separately. Their chief interest lies precisely in the way they theologise the book of Esther, making explicit the providential reading that the Hebrew text leaves implicit, and in what they reveal about the discomfort some ancient readers felt at a scriptural book without a word about God. Scholars study the additions both as a case study in the growth and translation of biblical books and as evidence of the piety of Greek-speaking Judaism, which sought to frame even the most secular-seeming narratives of national deliverance within the language of prayer and divine action.