https://www.yourish.com/2012/12/20/17198 Cutting straight to the point Sat, 22 Dec 2012 14:05:50 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://www.yourish.com/2012/12/20/17198/comment-page-1#comment-47199 Sat, 22 Dec 2012 14:05:50 +0000 http://www.yourish.com/?p=17198#comment-47199 Esther is also the only canonical Hebrew book that doesn’t contain the Tetragrammaton (the four-letter name of God usually translated as LORD in English, ore referred to as HA SHEM in Hebrew [respecting the Third Commandment]). I wonder if the absence of that name from Esther also played into the Essenes’ excluding it from their library.

]]> https://www.yourish.com/2012/12/20/17198/comment-page-1#comment-47166 Fri, 21 Dec 2012 01:23:47 +0000 http://www.yourish.com/?p=17198#comment-47166 One of the most interesting things about the scrolls, I think, is the absence of the Book of Esther. The late historian Cecil Roth wrote a book in the late 1950s, “The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Historical Interpretation,” in which he proposed that the scrolls found at Qumran were the library of the Zealots. He cited similarities bewtween what we know of the Zealots’ beliefs and what can be deduced from the scrolls about the beliefs of those who wrote them (particularly using the non-canonical scrolls). One of the tenets of the Zealots was that only The Lord should be sovereign over Israel. Esther is the only book in the canonical Bible that recognizes the sovereignty of a pagan king, the Persian King of Kings, over Israel. When the same range of scrolls, including both Biblical canon and non-canonical scrolls, was found at Masada, and still excluding Esther, Roth thought his thesis had received strong support. Personally, I think he was correct.

]]>