The Whole Megillah? Even after the book had been accepted as
canonical by all, its religious merits continued to be a matter
of dispute, with Jews tending to love the book (as its many
extant copies from the Middle Ages attest) and Christians often
ignoring or even disliking it. There are, for instance, no
allusions to the book in the New Testament, and rarely do Church
Fathers so much as even allude to it, let alone quote it. A
complete commentary was not written on it until that of Rhabanus
Maurus in the ninth century. In this post, I want to examine
whether the “epistle” additions in Greek Esther are translation-
Greek. But let us start at the beginning: In Hebrew, the word
megillah means scroll, and when Jews talk about “HaMegillah”
(The Megillah) they are talking about one scroll in particular –
the Book of Esther. The book of Esther is a central focus of the
Jewish holiday Purim [which starts Saturday night] where the
book is read twice. (A few scholars speculate that Purim may
have borrowed elements fro