Choose Your Fate

Choose Your Fate
Psalm 83

Biblical scholar Michael V. Fox has what you might call a typical Jewish background. At the beginning of the twentieth century his grandfather had a narrow escape from pogroms in Russia, when hundreds of Jews were killed and thousands raped, mutilated, and despoiled. He has described how he happened to be born outside of the reach of Nazi power and thus escaped the Holocaust, and in a study titled Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther ([Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001], 12) Fox writes of what the book of Esther means to him in light of the history of his family and people. He comments on the way that God seems to be hidden in the Esther story, “as he has been so often, so inexplicably, so unforgivably, throughout history.”...