How do stories reflect and inform human experience of the world' This book investigates the relationship between Hebrew biblical narrative and the theological problem of theodicy. In the narrative-critical reading offered here, the Esther narrative and its post holocaust and rabbinic re-tellings can be seen as examples of survival literature, around which identity is forged as a matter of ethno-cultural life and death. Treloar argues that Esther is a maverick voice - a private transcript - hidden within the public transcripts of the Canon of scripture, biblical theology, and rabbinic exegesis. Narrative criticism is presented a s a means by which such voices might be better heard, and the violent reductionism of the final solution averted. Richard Treloar has taught hermeneutics, Old Testament and Systematic Theology at Trinity Theological College in Melbourne.