Reprinted after a decade, Michael Fox’s work is a lucid and accessibly guide to the book of Esther. With a careful use of background information it offers a reading that is particularly attentive to the book’s literary artistry. The first half of the book gives Fox’s translation and commentary (with technical textual information packaged in an appendix). The remainder tackles various issues with a particular focus on the characters in the book. Fox includes a chapter on the character of God where he argues that ‘carefully crafted indeterminacy is best explained as an attempt to convey uncertainty about God’s role in history’ (247). This second edition is unchanged except for a fifteen page postscript. Fox reviews the major scholarly work on Esther of the last ten years with a particular eye to the themes of his own work.

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