Jews and Anti-Judaism in Esther and the Church by Tricia Miller (review)

Beloved by Jews, the biblical book of Esther has had a checkered history of reception among the gentiles. Early Christian theologians casually overlooking the first few chapters of the book expressed discomfort with its violent and vindictive resolution. Martin Luther famously disparaged Esther for seeming to promote an inchoate form of Jewish nationalism. To this day, the very qualities of the book that ensure its enduring appeal to Jewish readers find their ways into antisemitic tirades of the basest variety, including those targeting the Jewish state.

Acknowledging that unfortunate phenomenon, Tricia Miller proposes to trace a continuous history of Esther’s abuse in the hands of Christian critics of the State of Israel apt to misconstrue its message of redemption as a message of hate. A research analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), Miller focuses her criticism on those evangelical Christians whom she accuses of blindly subscribing to a Palestinian narrative of Israeli oppression entailing the same outdated supersessionist theology that informed past Christian ambivalence toward the book of Esther.

Regrettably, the author’s high-minded premise falls flat on arrival. As she acknowledges in her introduction, the present study originated in Miller’s doctoral dissertation, which she published under separate cover as Three Versions of Esther: Their Relationship to Anti-Semitic and Feminist Critique of the Story (2014). Yet what she offers in the volume presently under review duplicates so much of her previous work that it barely rates above self-plagiarism. The new book is essentially an abridgement of the old with a few new elements inelegantly tacked on at the end. Consequently, the first four of its five chapters are concerned with issues of no clear relevance to Miller’s stated agenda.

Of principal interest in these chapters is the author’s effort to parse those sections of Esther’s narrative most frequently exploited by Christian commentators wishing to malign Judaism. Miller challenges that premise with detailed contextual analyses of those sections as they appear in the book’s oldest surviving versions, namely, its Masoretic Hebrew version, the expanded “Old Greek” version of the Septuagint, and the so-called “Alpha-text,” an alternative Greek version of uncertain provenance. Although not without its merits, Miller’s treatment of the three Esthers is fairly derivative and not entirely in step with current research. Curiously, she seems to invest undue confidence in the historicity of the Hebrew book and, conversely, the unreliability of its Greek versions, a position neither warranted by the scholarship nor vital to her argument. More jarringly, her treatment abounds with content from her prior work that she ought to have jettisoned for the sake of the present one. One wonders, for instance, how Miller’s protracted efforts to establish the precise date of Esther’s Old Greek version speaks to its history of Christian reception. The same can be said of her digressions on the reputation of the Septuagint in the early Church and the evolution of its theological argument against Judaism. Miller does not attempt to explain how those topics speak to the sensibilities of contemporary evangelical Christians whose Bibles never contained editions of Esther based its Greek versions. Instead, she supplies only generic and peremptory assertions equating past expressions of Christian hostility toward Judaism with contemporary antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

The final chapter of the book delivers its promised payoff with a dull thud. Drawing upon several of her articles produced for CAMERA, Miller argues that contemporary Christians critical of the State of Israel have adopted a narrative unabashedly antisemitic in its intimation that the Palestinian Christians currently suffering the indignities of Israeli occupation have taken the place of the oppressed Israelites of the Bible. Miller’s point here is astute. Her impetus to expose the corrupt theological underpinnings of what she accounts as a growing trend among American evangelicals is therefore well taken. Yet she makes no effort to relate that trend to...