The history of biblical interpretation, once disparagingly dubbed ‘the study of the study’ has gained sufficient respectability for it to have a whole series of commentaries devoted to it, of which that on the book of Esther is the latest. However, the genre is an uncertain one, at any rate when it comes to commentaries on individual books of the Bible, and it is an open question whether the purpose of such commentaries is to enable modern readers to gain a greater understanding of the biblical text and how it might be used today, or whether it is an opportunity to bring to light interpreters and interpretations that, rightly or wrongly, have been long forgotten. The book of Esther is provocative in a number of ways: the absence, in the Hebrew version, of the name of God; Esther's initial reluctance to disclose her ethnicity; the attempt to destroy the Jewish communities in the Persian empire; and the punishment inflicted upon those who wished and failed to do this. There are clearly several ways in which these could be approached. This commentary divides Esther into narrative sections, each of which is then seen in the light of a wide range of interpreters and interpretations, from ancient, medieval and modern Jewish sources, through Christian writers, to responses to Esther in art, music, drama and literature. This is undoubtedly a tour de force of sources in English and English translation (almost no German sources are referred to), and although the sheer quantity of information is at times overwhelming, readers will gain a rich impression of the way in which the book of Esther has provoked responses from many and differing spheres over a long period of time. A small technical point is that transliterations from Hebrew sometimes begin with an opening quotation mark which has no corresponding closing mark. This makes it look as though the Hebrew letter ‘ayin is being transliterated, when this is not the case.