2 Esdras

What 2 Esdras is about

Second Esdras is a book of visions attributed to Ezra, and it opens with a complaint. If God chose Israel, why is Israel crushed while Babylon prospers? The question is put to an angel named Uriel, repeatedly and without much politeness, and the answers Ezra receives frustrate him as often as they satisfy.

That structure — a man arguing with heaven about justice — puts the book in the company of Job and Habakkuk, and it is the reason it has held readers’ attention for two thousand years. Uriel’s replies turn on the limits of human perspective: Ezra is asked to weigh fire, measure wind, and call back a day that is past, and told that the one who cannot do these cannot expect to understand the ways of the Most High.

The central section contains seven visions, including a mourning woman who is transformed into a rebuilt city, an eagle with many wings and heads, and a man rising from the sea. The imagery belongs to the same apocalyptic world as Daniel and Revelation, and readers familiar with those books will recognise its vocabulary.

The book also contains one of the more striking passages in this literature: an account of how the scriptures, lost in the destruction of Jerusalem, were dictated again over forty days.

Where it sits

Second Esdras is the most complicated of these books to place. It is not received as canonical by Catholics, and it falls outside the Greek Orthodox canon, though it circulated widely, was printed in an appendix to the Latin Vulgate, and appears in some Slavonic Bibles; Protestant Bibles that include the Apocrypha print it among them. It survives mainly in Latin, and its opening and closing chapters are Christian additions to a Jewish core written after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.

That date is worth knowing, because it explains the book’s grief. It was written by someone who had seen the temple destroyed and was trying to make sense of it.

Why it is worth reading

Because it asks the question of unjust suffering as directly as any ancient text does, and because it is a window into how Jewish writers of the first century were thinking — the world in which the New Testament was written. It should be read as a historical and devotional witness rather than as a source of doctrine, which is how the church has treated it.