Library/Old Testament pseudepigrapha
2 Esdras (4 Ezra)
Seven visions. Ezra cannot accept that the righteous are few and the world is for the many who perish. An angel answers with the Most High’s timetable, an eagle, a man from the sea, and the restoration of burned scripture in ninety-four books — twenty-four public, seventy for the wise.
- Status
- Orthodox canon (not Catholic)
- Date
- c. 90–100 CE (chs. 3–14); Christian frame later
- Languages
- Latin (complete) · other versions from a lost Greek/Hebrew
- Setting
- Ezra in Babylon, thirty years after the destruction — a cipher for after 70 CE
What it contains
- Dialogues of theodicy
- The mourning woman / Zion
- The eagle
- The man from the sea
- The ninety-four books
Why it sits outside most canons
Too late and too apocalyptic for the Tanakh; too Jewish-apocalyptic for some Christian lists; Slavonic and some Latin Bibles kept it in an appendix.
Themes
- Theodicy
- Election
- Apocalypse
- Secret books
- Son of Man figure
Passages
4 Ezra 14:45–46
Make public the twenty-four books you wrote first… but keep the seventy that were written last, in order to give them to the wise among your people.