Very few twentieth-century Bible scholars believed in the historicity of the book of Esther, but they certainly expended a lot of effort justifying their position. Lewis Bayles Paton, in 1908, wrote fourteen pages outlining the arguments for and against historicity and concluded that the book is not historical. In 1971 Carey A. Moore devoted eleven pages to the issue and arrived at the same conclusion. In more recent commentaries, those of Michael V. Fox in 1991 and Jon D. Levenson in 1997, we find nine and five pages respectively, with both authors agreeing that the book is fictional.1 You might notice that the number of pages is going down, probably because all the main points were laid out by Paton, and if you are going to rehash an argument you should do it in fewer pages than the original. But why does every commentator, myself included,2 rehash the argument? The question of historicity seems to have loomed larger for Esther than for most other books in the Hebrew Bible, at least until the last decade or so, when the historicity of all parts of the Bible was put in doubt. During the greater part of the last century, scholars assumed the basic historicity of most of the Bible, although problems in its historical and chronological information were duly noted and debated. Exceptions were stories that could be defined as myth, epic, and legend. These genres were well known from the ancient Near East, so
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