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The Synoptic Book of Esther
In English and Hebrew: with Essay, Notes and the Septuagint Version
Stephen Games
- Publication date
- 9 Feb. 2026
- Print length
- 82 pages
- ISBN - 13
- 9781915023759
- Dimensions
- 250 mm x 178 mm
The Synoptic Book of Esther
In English and Hebrew: with Essay, Notes and the Septuagint Version
Recommended, challenging and enjoyable.
Paul Shaw
I recently came across The Synoptic Book of Esther: With an Introduction, Endnotes, and the Septuagint Version in an Appendix, and I was immediately drawn to its fascinating and unconventional examination of one of the most intriguing books in the Bible.
The Book of Esther has long attracted attention because of its remarkable account of Jewish survival in the face of impending destruction, as well as the unusual absence of any direct mention of God. Your analysis takes this mystery further by examining the literary structure of the text, identifying differences in writing styles, tone, inconsistencies, and apparent redundancies that suggest the involvement of two distinct literary voices.
I was particularly intrigued by your proposal that these two voices, identified as M and E, may be associated with the perspectives of Mordecai and Esther. This interpretation introduces an interesting dimension to the familiar biblical narrative, suggesting that the story may also reflect a struggle over authorship, recognition, influence, and the role each character played in securing the survival of the Jewish people.
What makes your approach especially compelling is its exploration of gender, literary authority, and competing perspectives within an ancient religious text. The connection you draw between the Book of Esther, Aeschylus’s ancient Persian-themed drama, and Aristophanes’s Lysistrata also offers a fascinating opportunity to consider how literature has explored power, conflict, gender, and political influence across different civilizations.
I was also interested in the inclusion of the Septuagint version, with its additional sections, providing readers with an opportunity to compare different textual traditions and consider how biblical interpretation and transmission have shaped our understanding of the story.
I believe The Synoptic Book of Esther could inspire engaging conversations among readers interested in biblical studies, Jewish history, literary criticism, ancient literature, religious interpretation, textual analysis, gender studies, classical civilization, and the historical development of Scripture.
Muhammed Abdulazeez, from Underground Knowledge
About the book
The Book of Esther (the Megillah) is the last book in the Bible and one of only two biblical works that makes no mention of God (The Song of Songs is the other). Why is that? Why would the editors of the Bible include a story about the survival of the Jewish people in the face of almost certain destruction and not publicly attribute it to divine providence?
In this new and revelatory analysis, the designer and critic Stephen Games looks closely at the curiosities of the book as a piece of literature—at its changes of style and tone, at its inconsistencies and redundancies, and at the discrepancies in its writing—and identifies two different authors with two agendas and not a lot of common ground.
One is terse and businesslike, the other garrulous and detailed. Games calls the first of these M and the second of them E, and speculates that they can be equated with the two principal characters, Mordecai and Esther, even if Mordecai and Esther cannot be shown to be the actual authors.
In a dynamic introductory essay, he argues that from the very start of the book we see two separate stories diverge. Then, as the heroes of the story fight to save the Jewish people from the prospect of genocide, their literary avatars become locked in a battle to tell their own tale, claim that they and not the other played the more decisive role in orchestrating Jewish survival, and either reinforce or challenge gendered structures of power.
Apart from being an account of an existential threat to the Jews living under Xerxes’s rule, the Book of Esther is shown to be a playing out of a literary struggle exactly contemporary with Aeschylus’s earliest surviving play nearly 2,500 years ago (also about Persians) and fifty years before Aristophanes’s political comedy (Lysistrata) about another woman’s efforts to end a war.
Games offers a radical new reading of the Megillah and a startlingly original way of representing the text’s literary conflicts in visual form. The book includes his notes and also the Septuagint (Old Greek) text for comparison, with its six extra sections, rejected by the Jewish establishment 2,000 years ago.
Revealing the Book of Esther’s twin authorship.
Stephen Games
Stephen Games is the publisher and editor of EnvelopeBooks and of Booklaunch, the UK’s biggest books magazine. He is the author of 15 nonfiction titles. Stephen came to publishing after a lifetime reflecting on the creative arts. A former correspondent for the Guardian, documentary maker for the BBC and opinion writer for the Los Angeles Times, he studied Graphic Design and Architecture, taught as an adjunct professor at American and British universities and has a PhD from Cambridge University.
About the author