Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 68:1 (Spring 2006)
Article: But Did They Live Happily Ever After? The Eschatology of the Book of Esther
Author: Iain M. Duguid

WTJ 68:1 (Spring 2006) p. 85

But Did They Live Happily Ever After?
The Eschatology of the Book of Esther

Iain M. Duguid

Iain Duguid is Professor of Old Testament at Westminster Seminary California, Escondido, Calif. This article is a revised version of his inaugural lecture, which was delivered on 16 February 2005.

The eschatology of the Book of Esther may seem at first sight to be an unpromising topic for an article. Some scholars doubt that the book even has a theology to speak of, let alone an eschatology. After all, the book does not mention the name of God even once on its pages, and has been described as a work that is “detheologized” and “desacralized.”1 Putting this position even more strongly, J. E. McFadyen stated that “all the romantic glamour of the story cannot blind us to its religious emptiness and moral depravity.”2 Many would agree with the opinion of the nineteenth-century German scholar Heinrich Ewald, who said that when you come to Esther from the other books of the OT, you “fall from heaven to earth.”3

If heaven is as completely absent from the Book of Esther as Ewald suggested, then it could hardly have an eschatology. For, according to Geerhardus Vos,

[e]schatology deals with the expectation of beliefs characteristic of some religions that: (a) the world or part of the world moves to a definite goal (telos); (b) there is a new final order of affairs beyond the present. It is the doctrine of the consummation of the world-process in a supreme crisis leading on into a permanent state.4

In other words, eschatology is the expectation that this present world order (“the earthly”) is neither all-encompassing nor ultimate: there is another world (“heaven”) whose values and laws are determinative for the course and the goal of history.

In this article, I will argue that the Book of Esther is far from being focused exclusively on the earthly, as Ewald suggested. On the contrary, a fundamental conflict between the heavenly order and the earthly order underlies the whole narrative, from beginning to end. The end of the story of Esther depicts a triumph for the heavenly (“eschatological”) order, but a triumph that is as yet only partial and incomplete. An awareness of the larger trajectory of redemption is

WTJ 68:1 (Spring 2006) p. 86

alluded to in key phrases and motifs that serve to show that fulfillment of the heavenly order is not yet a present reality. To adopt the classic Hollywood imagery, the Book...