Over a thousand years and a thousand pages, the Hebrew Bible relates the history of God as he appeared to the Jews and among them: as creator and mentor, as redeemer, warrior, and fortress of refuge. Only in Esther does the trail grow faint, the pen weary, the sense of things irrevocably blurred. History continues, but the Bible ends. It is the Jews who are sent into exile from their land, but it is God for whom there no longer seems to be any place. What does Esther have to teach us that we do not already know – of the emptiness and grief of the old tale as it drags on, with man now the only actor, with the enemy now facing us across the stage, squinting with pleasure to have found us so alone?

What can be the meaning of a book of the Bible in which there is no mention of God, however so incidental, if not to inform us, two thousand years before Nietzsche, that the evidence of God's actions in the world has ceased – that the earth has been unchained from its sun, that it has grown darker, colder? For this much, one has no need of Esther, which, coming as it does at least a century after the reduction of Jerusalem, can seem hardly more than a bitter redundancy. Had not Jeremiah, speaking of the end of the eternal city, already written that all that had been achieved in the creation had now been ruined?

Had not even the books of Moses foretold this same end, of the departure of God from among men?

What more is there to add to the horror of God's absence after these words?