A Narrative Semiotic Analysis Of "Esther"

The Bible is undeniably the most famous piece of writings and most widely read in the world.To interpret and understand the Bible correctly is very prerequisite to the ideology of the whole society.In fact,the Bible itself bears witness that its interpretation can be a difficult matter.During the past two centuries,the study of the Bible became and has continued to be an academic subject.At almost any time within this period,it has been possible to point either to one dominant method of biblical research or to two or three competing methods.The goal of biblical studies has been essentially one:to find the most appropriate and academically well-founded method for analyzing and interpreting the biblical text.Besides hermeneutics which is the oldest and the earliest way to study the Bible,there are many approaches to interpret the Bible,such as historical-critical method,rhetoric method,narrative analysis and semiotic analysis and so on.Among the methods identified as synchronic,those namely which concentrate on the study of the biblical text as it comes before the reader in its final state,is semiotics analysis,which not only help us understand the meaning of biblical stories but also the structure of the text.There are three reasons that we choose to study this story in Greimas's narrative semiotics.Firstly,this story is one of the two biblical stories named by a female's name, the other is "Ruth".Secondly,there are not any words about "God","Lord" in this story, which is not as usual as other biblical stories.Lastly,up till now,the story has not been explained in Greimas's narrative semiotics.The paper analyzes the biblical story from the perspectives of literary and theology on the discursive level,the narrative level and the deep level.There are 5 chapters in all in this thesis,their organization is as follows:Chapter one introduces different research methods to the Bible,the purpose as well as the story of Esther and the organization of the whole thesis.Chapter Two gives an account of the Greimas's narrative semiotics.Chapter Three analyzes Esther from the perspective of literary.By analyzing the story in Greimas's narrative semiotics,we can get that female occupy an important position in history and God helped Jews all the time,he didn't throw away the Jews who lived a wretched life far from home.Chapter Four analyzes Esther from the perspective of theology.There are three narrative models and the contact model is one of them.Because God made a convent (contract)(see Jeremiah 30:10,11)with the Jews,we use contact model to analyze Esther.God made a contract,sent Esther to save the Jews and finally fulfilled his promise.Chapter Five is the conclusion,including the summary of the thesis,limitations of current study and possibilities of further research.The thesis reveals that narrative semiotics is useful and effective in analyzing the Bible.We should bear in mind that Esther is part of Jewish history,so we have to analyze Esther in a fixed period and culture.There is no doubt that analyzing discourse with history and culture will become one of the main fields in the author's future study.