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Esther Scroll: The Story of the Story
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260 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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December 24, 2017
A review of Esther Scroll By David J. A. Clines, especially one written by me, must come with many disclaimers. For one, I must humble myself and say that I am no scholar and that not every contention (or acquiescence, for that matter) I make will be accurate. I must also admonish that reading this work is my first extensive exploration of biblical criticism in any capacity. My thoughts, therefore, may be somewhat embryonic.
When reading a book of this sort, a book that questions everything about a text considered sacrosanct, it is easy to forget about the motivations for such efforts. For the less open minded, it is easy to shun such questioning as barbaric from the get-go. For the more open minded, these questions feed into the curiosity of approaching the text as a whole. In scanning his pages, Clines inclines the reader to wonder constantly not simply whether or not his claims are valid, but whether or not they can be valid, and what this could mean for the import of the book of Esther.
For the most part Clines can be very reader friendly. He promises in the preface to keep “the needs of different readers in mind” and to “signpost the beginnings and ends of chapters with some account of the argument” (Clines 7). This specific promise is certainly kept. Each chapter ends with a constructive rehash of what has been and a connective foreshadowing to what is to come. He is sure to ensure that the reader takes a pause to digest such heavy information as was discussed, and this helps very much to lighten the load.
Even before the preface is left Clines makes his first stab at enmity with his reader. While on the milder side because it is done playfully, Clines prints two phrases in Greek and cites them, although doesn’t bother to translate them. This would of course be excusable as a singular offense, but the reality is not so. There are dozens of places where Ancient Greek is written out with the assumption that the reader is privy to extracting information from such gibberish. Whole tables for comparison of the Greek texts to the Hebrew are not touched in so far as translation is concerned (Clines 86-91). The reader is then perplexed when he gets to Greek text comparisons in Chapter 8 (P. 110) where the English is beautifully juxtaposed to each corresponding Greek text quote. Am I supposed to know Ancient Greek or not!
The problem is all the more rampant in the footnotes, wherein whole footnotes are untranslatedly quoted in German, and likely multiple other languages that I cannot distinguish from German. I already ceded and accepted that the footnotes are in the back of the book, for perhaps not many people are interested in reading them (their loss). But those of us who sit with a finger in the Alpha Text and another in the footnotes, diligently flipping back and forth to further the insights made in the text, the least we can ask for is to have footnotes that we can comprehend as well as sound out phonetically. If the Esther and Mordechai motifs are so very “eng ineinander verschlungen” (Ch 9 Note 16) then it is likely that I should know what this means. I’m very proud of Bardtke that he said nine lines of relevant, quotable information, but his opinions are unhelpful if I cannot understand them (Ch 3 Note 30). This sort of thing appears many more times, even in the text itself (ex. P. 49) to the point that the reader is immune to words of other languages because he gave up trying to understand them, which dulls his diligence in attempting to piece the author’s thoughts together.
Thankfully Clines, aside from assuming that his readers are hexalingual, is direct in addressing information that the reader may be lacking. While a comfortable knowledge of the Masoretic Text is expected, points made about the Alpha Text and others are not made assuming the reader has prior knowledge. Clines takes time to walk the reader through the Greek additions and their import, cogently expressing the relevant concerns and cultivating the reader to be able to engage in the discussions to be put forward in the future. This the author does very well.
Another point of contention, which is less the fault of the author but still for the reader to be wary of, is the sheer density of the material in this work. This is not even slightly light reading. Lists are composed to make complex points, each bullet paragraphs long and perhaps a mental chapter in itself. Serious footnotes complicate and enhance the points made. References to the Alpha Text ask the reader to make thoughtful observations about a passage or phrase extremely frequently. Even after having carefully read the book I can flip through it and find things I don’t recall ever encountering. It is simply that dense of a topic.
Now that the housekeeping points have been verbalized we can return to Clines in how he deals with his criticism and its import for the meaning of the book of Esther. Clines begins by attempting to share what makes him so keen to shave off parts of the Masoretic Text of Esther. Being unfamiliar with biblical criticism I can’t tell how relatively valid his claim is in so far as this class of critique is concerned. What I can say, however, is that his approach here seems to be fairly hinged on subjectivism. Clines is infatuated with the narrative expertise with which he claims most of Masoretic Text Esther was written. As his reader, I was not successfully instilled with such infatuation and thus the crux of his point did not detonate within me, namely that the last two chapters (at least) could not possibly have been written by the same narrator because of their lack of urbanity. Clines takes for granted how obvious this should be and thus his attempts to show it to be the case are not thoroughly convincing.
Clines uses this disregard of the end of the Masoretic Text to continue to his main claim. He attempts to demonstrate that the LXX Greek text is a translation of a semitic original that was very similar to the present Masoretic Text, while the Alpha Text is a translation of a completely different semitic original. He regards this semitic original as older and perhaps ancestral to that of the Masoretic and LXX texts. He pores over many distinguishments in diction, style and, connotation, suggests how they fit into his theory, and moves on. He discusses different groupings of types of redactions, presenting the theories of others and tweaking them to fit the information he presents. List after list, the reader is taken through each of the minutiae of evidence as the bold claim is built from the ground up.
While Clines goes through his arguments, making some points that are more convincing than others, the reader is left wondering what Clines is interested in accomplishing. Through most of the work Clines concedes that his claims are not necessarily conclusive but does not discuss why he attempts to make them in spite of this fact. His bookends at the ends of chapters share nothing in so far as his motivation is concerned. Thus for many a page the reader feels almost hopeless, for the efforts put into understanding Clines’ points are great and the pseudo-conclusions that are come to seem less than worth the effort. If the goal was simply to acknowledge that there is doubt as to the origins of the Book of Esther, Clines would not, the reader hopes, spend so much time defending the specifics of his claims as to the book’s origins.
Clines, at long last, somewhat satiates the reader in this matter for the first time near the beginning of the second to last chapter, chapter nine. In a sentence that jars the thirsty reader, Clines finally admits that “The fact that such an analysis can be made is of course no argument that it should be made” (Clines 123). This is, in context, not a question of his work as a whole but a questioning of the (not so relevant) claim that the Masoretic Text is derived from separate Esther and Mordechai source texts. Even so, the awareness is surfaced and the reader bates his breath for Clines to extend this assertion to the rest of his claims.
In reflecting on the same question, Clines states that “The best argument in favor of the hypothesis [that there are separate Esther and Mordechai source texts] is that it is coherent- which is at least a necessary condition of its truth, if not a sufficient one” (Clines 124). Clines is sure to distinguish between the hypothesis in question and those that are dealt with in the rest of the work, in that each other hypothesis has going for it that it “... explains discrepancies, repetitions and unevennesses…” (Clines 123) but the claim still applies: while each and every hypothesis Clines presents may be coherent, this is not sufficient for claiming that such hypotheses are true. The reader’s question stands: if we cannot be conclusive about the truth of certain claims, why make such claims at all?
Clines does not leave the reader to wallow in these thoughts, for chapter ten unravels some of the mystery. When Clines subtitles his book as The Story of The Story, he truly means it and plans not to leave on a note of vague and inconclusive, scattered theory, but to draw everything together and actually tell the story of how Esther came to be what it is today. This finale gives the reader a true appreciation of why Clines was so meticulous about demonstrating his claims, even with the concession that they aren’t infallibly historically accurate. The reader finally understands that while not every point is likely to be historically accurate, the formation of a plausible theory of how Esther came to be can be used as an informative framework for judging new information about Esther that may arise or seeing old information in a new light.
If you’re wondering whether or not this book is worthwhile, that will obviously depend on what you are looking for. I certainly do not recommend this as a first dive into serious Esther study. More fundamental books such as Koller’s Esther In Ancient Jewish Thought and Hazony’s God and Politics in Esther would be far more productive departure points. I also highly recommend analyzing the Greek texts and comparing them to the Masoretic Text diligently yourself before you let someone with his time-hardened ideas about such analysis influence your thoughts. Coming in to reading this work having started to form opinions about the place of these texts in history should supplement this book and make it a worthwhile read. You may want to learn a few languages first, though.
When reading a book of this sort, a book that questions everything about a text considered sacrosanct, it is easy to forget about the motivations for such efforts. For the less open minded, it is easy to shun such questioning as barbaric from the get-go. For the more open minded, these questions feed into the curiosity of approaching the text as a whole. In scanning his pages, Clines inclines the reader to wonder constantly not simply whether or not his claims are valid, but whether or not they can be valid, and what this could mean for the import of the book of Esther.
For the most part Clines can be very reader friendly. He promises in the preface to keep “the needs of different readers in mind” and to “signpost the beginnings and ends of chapters with some account of the argument” (Clines 7). This specific promise is certainly kept. Each chapter ends with a constructive rehash of what has been and a connective foreshadowing to what is to come. He is sure to ensure that the reader takes a pause to digest such heavy information as was discussed, and this helps very much to lighten the load.
Even before the preface is left Clines makes his first stab at enmity with his reader. While on the milder side because it is done playfully, Clines prints two phrases in Greek and cites them, although doesn’t bother to translate them. This would of course be excusable as a singular offense, but the reality is not so. There are dozens of places where Ancient Greek is written out with the assumption that the reader is privy to extracting information from such gibberish. Whole tables for comparison of the Greek texts to the Hebrew are not touched in so far as translation is concerned (Clines 86-91). The reader is then perplexed when he gets to Greek text comparisons in Chapter 8 (P. 110) where the English is beautifully juxtaposed to each corresponding Greek text quote. Am I supposed to know Ancient Greek or not!
The problem is all the more rampant in the footnotes, wherein whole footnotes are untranslatedly quoted in German, and likely multiple other languages that I cannot distinguish from German. I already ceded and accepted that the footnotes are in the back of the book, for perhaps not many people are interested in reading them (their loss). But those of us who sit with a finger in the Alpha Text and another in the footnotes, diligently flipping back and forth to further the insights made in the text, the least we can ask for is to have footnotes that we can comprehend as well as sound out phonetically. If the Esther and Mordechai motifs are so very “eng ineinander verschlungen” (Ch 9 Note 16) then it is likely that I should know what this means. I’m very proud of Bardtke that he said nine lines of relevant, quotable information, but his opinions are unhelpful if I cannot understand them (Ch 3 Note 30). This sort of thing appears many more times, even in the text itself (ex. P. 49) to the point that the reader is immune to words of other languages because he gave up trying to understand them, which dulls his diligence in attempting to piece the author’s thoughts together.
Thankfully Clines, aside from assuming that his readers are hexalingual, is direct in addressing information that the reader may be lacking. While a comfortable knowledge of the Masoretic Text is expected, points made about the Alpha Text and others are not made assuming the reader has prior knowledge. Clines takes time to walk the reader through the Greek additions and their import, cogently expressing the relevant concerns and cultivating the reader to be able to engage in the discussions to be put forward in the future. This the author does very well.
Another point of contention, which is less the fault of the author but still for the reader to be wary of, is the sheer density of the material in this work. This is not even slightly light reading. Lists are composed to make complex points, each bullet paragraphs long and perhaps a mental chapter in itself. Serious footnotes complicate and enhance the points made. References to the Alpha Text ask the reader to make thoughtful observations about a passage or phrase extremely frequently. Even after having carefully read the book I can flip through it and find things I don’t recall ever encountering. It is simply that dense of a topic.
Now that the housekeeping points have been verbalized we can return to Clines in how he deals with his criticism and its import for the meaning of the book of Esther. Clines begins by attempting to share what makes him so keen to shave off parts of the Masoretic Text of Esther. Being unfamiliar with biblical criticism I can’t tell how relatively valid his claim is in so far as this class of critique is concerned. What I can say, however, is that his approach here seems to be fairly hinged on subjectivism. Clines is infatuated with the narrative expertise with which he claims most of Masoretic Text Esther was written. As his reader, I was not successfully instilled with such infatuation and thus the crux of his point did not detonate within me, namely that the last two chapters (at least) could not possibly have been written by the same narrator because of their lack of urbanity. Clines takes for granted how obvious this should be and thus his attempts to show it to be the case are not thoroughly convincing.
Clines uses this disregard of the end of the Masoretic Text to continue to his main claim. He attempts to demonstrate that the LXX Greek text is a translation of a semitic original that was very similar to the present Masoretic Text, while the Alpha Text is a translation of a completely different semitic original. He regards this semitic original as older and perhaps ancestral to that of the Masoretic and LXX texts. He pores over many distinguishments in diction, style and, connotation, suggests how they fit into his theory, and moves on. He discusses different groupings of types of redactions, presenting the theories of others and tweaking them to fit the information he presents. List after list, the reader is taken through each of the minutiae of evidence as the bold claim is built from the ground up.
While Clines goes through his arguments, making some points that are more convincing than others, the reader is left wondering what Clines is interested in accomplishing. Through most of the work Clines concedes that his claims are not necessarily conclusive but does not discuss why he attempts to make them in spite of this fact. His bookends at the ends of chapters share nothing in so far as his motivation is concerned. Thus for many a page the reader feels almost hopeless, for the efforts put into understanding Clines’ points are great and the pseudo-conclusions that are come to seem less than worth the effort. If the goal was simply to acknowledge that there is doubt as to the origins of the Book of Esther, Clines would not, the reader hopes, spend so much time defending the specifics of his claims as to the book’s origins.
Clines, at long last, somewhat satiates the reader in this matter for the first time near the beginning of the second to last chapter, chapter nine. In a sentence that jars the thirsty reader, Clines finally admits that “The fact that such an analysis can be made is of course no argument that it should be made” (Clines 123). This is, in context, not a question of his work as a whole but a questioning of the (not so relevant) claim that the Masoretic Text is derived from separate Esther and Mordechai source texts. Even so, the awareness is surfaced and the reader bates his breath for Clines to extend this assertion to the rest of his claims.
In reflecting on the same question, Clines states that “The best argument in favor of the hypothesis [that there are separate Esther and Mordechai source texts] is that it is coherent- which is at least a necessary condition of its truth, if not a sufficient one” (Clines 124). Clines is sure to distinguish between the hypothesis in question and those that are dealt with in the rest of the work, in that each other hypothesis has going for it that it “... explains discrepancies, repetitions and unevennesses…” (Clines 123) but the claim still applies: while each and every hypothesis Clines presents may be coherent, this is not sufficient for claiming that such hypotheses are true. The reader’s question stands: if we cannot be conclusive about the truth of certain claims, why make such claims at all?
Clines does not leave the reader to wallow in these thoughts, for chapter ten unravels some of the mystery. When Clines subtitles his book as The Story of The Story, he truly means it and plans not to leave on a note of vague and inconclusive, scattered theory, but to draw everything together and actually tell the story of how Esther came to be what it is today. This finale gives the reader a true appreciation of why Clines was so meticulous about demonstrating his claims, even with the concession that they aren’t infallibly historically accurate. The reader finally understands that while not every point is likely to be historically accurate, the formation of a plausible theory of how Esther came to be can be used as an informative framework for judging new information about Esther that may arise or seeing old information in a new light.
If you’re wondering whether or not this book is worthwhile, that will obviously depend on what you are looking for. I certainly do not recommend this as a first dive into serious Esther study. More fundamental books such as Koller’s Esther In Ancient Jewish Thought and Hazony’s God and Politics in Esther would be far more productive departure points. I also highly recommend analyzing the Greek texts and comparing them to the Masoretic Text diligently yourself before you let someone with his time-hardened ideas about such analysis influence your thoughts. Coming in to reading this work having started to form opinions about the place of these texts in history should supplement this book and make it a worthwhile read. You may want to learn a few languages first, though.
September 19, 2024
I learned of this book by reading commentaries on Esther by Frederic Bush and Michael V. Fox. I was intrigued by Clines's hypothesis, mentioned by both authors, that the fear of the Jews mentioned in Esther 8.17 is not fear of the military might of the Jews, but rather religious awe. Clines makes a pretty good case, but both Bush and Fox, probably correctly, reject the hypothesis. The hypothesis depends on supposing a religious urtext lying behind the Masoretic version that the Masoretic redactor stripped of religious references. Karen H. Jobes, in her book on the Alpha Text of Esther, points out that the Masoretic Text lacks the sort of redactional seams we would expect to see if a redactor reworked the text in this way.
Even if a scholar comes to questionable conclusion, that doesn’t mean they are not worth reading. Working out in your mind why a point is questionable can be a valuable exercise for its own sake. Of course, not every point Clines makes is questionable. However, if time was short I would recommend Jobes's book over either Clines's or Fox's, as it is much more thorough.
Of course, the inclusion of the Alpha Text with a facing translation in English is worth the price of admission. Fox's later book on the redaction of Esther also includes the Alpha Text, but the font is much smaller and harder to read, and no translation is included.
Even if a scholar comes to questionable conclusion, that doesn’t mean they are not worth reading. Working out in your mind why a point is questionable can be a valuable exercise for its own sake. Of course, not every point Clines makes is questionable. However, if time was short I would recommend Jobes's book over either Clines's or Fox's, as it is much more thorough.
Of course, the inclusion of the Alpha Text with a facing translation in English is worth the price of admission. Fox's later book on the redaction of Esther also includes the Alpha Text, but the font is much smaller and harder to read, and no translation is included.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews