Biblical Farce — The Book of Esther Laughs at Empire: “I am so great an enemy” to Esther, said Luther, “that I wish it had not come to us at all.” He felt it had too much “Judaizing” and “pagan naughtiness.” But the book is edgy, funny, and strange, a holy book about a woman who—without father or brother or husband, without being pure or holy or virginal—stands in the eye of an ego-driven, farcical, man-made, nearly catastrophic storm and acts to save her people from destruction.
