The First and Second Book of Esdras

By Archibald Duff

Before providing helpful notes and English translations of the first and second books of Esdras, Archibald Duff gives an in-depth introduction to the books. This introduction covers the books’ origin, authorship, and intended audience. Dedicated sections explain each book’s doctrine, and Duff lays out “The Christian’s Need for Esdras 1 and 2.”-Print ed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Braunfell Books
• Release date: Nov 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839749766

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

INTRODUCTION 5

OF CANONICAL AND NON-CANONICAL BOOKS 5

OF THE CHRISTIAN’S NEED FOR ESDRAS I. AND II. 7

THE PARTICULAR ORIGIN OF ESDRAS I. 11

THE ORIGIN OF ESDRAS II. 14

ANALYSIS OF THE CONTENTS OF ESDRAS I. 16

THE FAITHS OF THE AUTHORS AND READERS OF ESDRAS I. 23

ANALYSIS OF ESDRAS II. 24

OF THE DOCTRINES OR RELIGIOUS VIEWS OF ESDRAS II. 31

The First Book of Esdras 32

The Second Book of Esdras 53

THE FIRST AND SECOND BOOK OF ESDRAS

EDITED BY

ARCHIBALD DUFF D.D. L.L.D

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Reproduced from a photograph by Mr. HOLLYER of Sir E. BURNE-JONES’ picture, ‘Uriel.’

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INTRODUCTION

OF CANONICAL AND NON-CANONICAL BOOKS

(i.) He who takes up this booklet and sees it styled ‘Apocryphal’ will doubtless wonder why one dubs it with so sinister a name. For this says just about the same as ‘furtive,’ ‘disguised,’ not to say ‘thievish’ or ‘sneaking.’ But, alas, we have all been taught to feel a little qualm when we buy a Bible that contains the Apocrypha, lest we be entering among bad companions, or at least are encouraging booksellers in bringing too near to very precious pages some others that are verily profane.

Yet, let us pause to reflect what ‘Canonical’ means to us, and while our Creeds and our Greek warn us that ‘the Canon is our Rule of Faith and Practice,’ very few do look to canonical books to find either. Neither one sort of men among us nor another studies Leviticus for such ends, although, verily, it was meant as a stern rule of both Faith and Practice in its time; and even Romans has scarcely ever been counted as practically canonical in such sense. The words ‘Canonical’ and ‘Apocryphal’ have practically been always and purely esthetic distinctions.

(ii.) Serious it is, however, to find that by calling Esdras I. and II. uncanonical and apocryphal, we have accustomed ourselves to think little or lightly, or even not at all, of a great part of the life of our Lord Jesus. Herein we have really hurt Him and our own souls. This present little volume hopes to heal these wounds somewhat.

For consider how a knowledge of Jesus and of His Words and Love and Death depends on a knowledge of the people who lived round about Him, and on a knowledge of the nationality He shared with them. To know Jesus depends on knowing the Jew, despised though he has been. Therein the Jew has been singularly like Jesus, writ large, for each has been, and is, a marvellous microcosm, ay, and macrocosm of real life; each has been ‘rejected of men,’ and each also ‘sees his seed and pro-longs his days.’ That grows plain to the reader of Esdras I. and II.

For who shall know the Jewish nationality who does not feel the fight of the books of Maccabees? Who shall understand the Lord’s yearning to convince or to condemn, to soothe or smite the Pharisee dissenter if he does not feel the wail of the Psalms of Solomon? Who shall see the justice of Jesus towards a Nicodemus if he have not sat with Jesus among the thinkers and writers and readers of ‘Wisdom’? Or who shall sit beneath the Cross and drop hot tears on that pitiful spot realising that the Paschal Lamb of God feeds his soul, if he turns careless away from the hunger to eat the Passover that moves in every word of Esdras I.? As for Esdras II., read his agony and his faith, and understand why Jesus said, ‘Thou art not far from the Kingdom of God.’

(iii.) These two little pamphlets might well be called canonical and normative for him who would preach Christ. For to know them and their origin and their doctrine and their significance is to know the souls whom Jesus tried to heal and help, and to whose hunger for a ‘Christ’ and for a ‘Saviour’ He cried, ‘Come unto Me.’ It was to their agony over inborn sin and to their longing for a new heaven and a new earth that Paul and John preached. Here in Esdras I. and II. is canon for a teacher of Christianity.

OF THE CHRISTIAN’S NEED FOR ESDRAS I. AND II.

(i.) Let us condescend to a few particulars. Of late a true and fine instinct has said that we today must know more of the ‘Historical Christ.’ We feel that we must see and touch the Jesus of actual events in Nazareth, and as He lived in that first century. We think that if we should see Him and come to Him we should find true rest, and more rest, for our souls. Good; come near and look.

We shall find Him, a young man, sitting often amid a dervish-like company. For twenty years one of such a company was surely Joseph, and Mary was never far from his side. You may almost hear one of these same dervishes reciting aloud paragraphs of Esdras I. Perhaps it is his own soul’s writing. The booklet is the breath of Jesus’s environment.

(ii) Recall that strong yet sacred sentence in John i. that makes us tremble still, and always makes us glad:—

‘The Word became Flesh.’

The utterance of God in and through flesh, and men, and the human race goes on ever, as surely as God ever lives and must speak forever. But knowing all that, we still seek something more, something more pointedly defined. ‘We would see Jesus!’ And we would see how He became. We would know how His very body took form, how features in Him fashioned themselves, how thought-seeds sank into His mind, and sprang to possessions and to parts of the very Man of God. What was wont to kindle His eye, to redden His cheek and brow with eagerness? What were His ways? To answer this yearning no merely imagined pictures will suffice. We shall turn unfilled from them, although such imaginations of our hearts be woven of traits and threads that we have seen and loved in noble souls of our own day, Some of these present-day features may indeed date from long ago; but some come from the experiences, customs, philosophies of the Evangelical Revival or of the Puritans, or of the Reformers, or of the great time of Renascence, or from the Middle Ages or Darker Days before. All are precious, and all are features of the Body of Christ Living on Forever: but they are still not features that He bore in His days on earth. Subjective fancying of what Jesus was may be poetry, and is often very beautiful and valuable; but it is not the Jesus of the Gospels. For knowledge of that we shall get light from Esdras I. and II.

(iii.) Nor may we follow the tempting plan of piecing together, as in a puzzle, all the various records written and handed down concerning Jesus in our New Testament. If we do, we shall then have to say in one breath that He both did say or do, and also did not say or do, this and that. All records are precious material for history and a historical picture of Jests or of any other soul; and so each jot or tittle must be strictly and lovingly weighed and accorded its exactly due influence in developing our great portrait. But so, also, no prejudice must dare to bar any word, or line, or opinion held anywhere in those days. Some singular contributions are to be got from Esdras I. and II., for these were written in and about the very days of Jesus. It will not do to think that traditionally canonical scriptures only may furnish us with material for such a sacred task. History knows no canon save its own events, and it reads every possible record to find these.

(iv.) The historical portraiture of Jesus must include the background against which He stands, the arena where He lived and loved and saved. Our knowledge of Him is always felt to depend on the words and mind of those men who had been with Him. He was just the vis viva that made them be what they were; and we study the vis viva by observing the phenomena it produces. We see Jesus by seeing Paul and the twelve and many another. But how shall we know what He made them unless we know what they were before the light of His face and love and voice fell on them? Now, the heart and the hopes, the hunger, the agonies, the joys and the griefs—in short, the men whom Jesus changed are to be seen before their change in Esdras I., and especially in Esdras II.

(v.) When we look closely at those men, the unchanged men, as they live and think and speak in these two little pamphlets, we can see how their souls grew to be what they were. We seem to hear them cry out, with a strange pathos, the need and nature of their souls. They say, ‘We are not one or two; we are a great company and congregation of weary souls, that speak often one to another, and say unto our God, How long, O Lord. Among us are children and fathers and fathers’ fathers, and we are all labouring and heavy-laden. We believe that God will help us. We do and say and observe those things and ways and words that we hope will please Him. He has revealed, He does reveal, He will reveal His mind ever more and more to us. O, when will He show us His kingdom?’ We wonder as we read. We see that Jesus brought just what these souls needed. He gave them power to rest in God. But, as we listen to their cry, we are forced to ask how they came to attain so high a height. What were the generation that had begotten such high hope and grasp, hunger and vision? As we feel the compulsion to this question, there steals in upon us the understanding that to know the source whence these came is to know the source whence Jesus came Himself.

(vi.) Let us think of it that Christians of those days saw and said, ‘Jesus was Himself of this people, the Jews, according to the flesh.’ There is a customary opinion that we need not know Joseph: what Joseph was has nothing to do with what our Lord Jesus was. Yet we must know the father of Mary. He cannot be left out, nor may her fathers’ fathers be passed by. Of them Jesus was according to the flesh. So shall we know the story of Mary’s soul, and of the matrons and the maidens who sat with her behind the screens of the synagogues. So shall we know the boys and girls whom those told at home about Moses and the Prophets and all the Writings they had been hearing read. So shall we know the schoolboy days of Jesus, and the play times and the comrades of those years. Quite possibly some of these comrades helped to write Esdras I., say A.D. 20; and quite surely some of them helped to mould the younger life of the writer of Esdras II., say A.D. 90.

What pictures rose before those lads as the rabbi schoolmasters told of the dear, dear past; and as together they chanted daily the Hymns and Psalms sung or written by Pharisee dissenters or by stately official Sadducees. How did these boys’ eyes wonder together at the words:—

‘Whom have I in heaven but Thee:

None upon earth do I desire beside Thee!’

Did their pulses beat slow at the awful cruelty of the lines:—

‘Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones

Against the rock!’

To study Jesus thus has not been our wont; but it is our duty. We have been leaving out of our ken visions of Him which we may see clearly in these Jewish comrades of His. Does anyone fear that this may make us think less of Him? Will it make us wonder whether there was left any good and godlike thing for Him to bring? Nay, then it will be enough to read Esdras II. alongside of Romans vii. It will be enough to remember how He told them they were not far from the Kingdom, and that when the best of them, directly or indirectly, murdered Him, He prayed, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ He brought!—what? He brought Himself; and the sight of that, the knowledge of Him, was power enough to win them to oneness with Him. It did prove to be enough to create many into His likeness.

(vii.) Let us look back, however, more intently. It was the faith of the devout and beautiful men among us not long ago that Malachi closed, say 500 B.C., all the utterances of God to men that were ever given before Jesus came. Indeed, it was even pointed out that the last words of Malachi were, ‘Lest I come and smite the earth with a curse!’ Men might well be in dread after that, lest any other words of such an Awful Spirit should be uttered to them. God was actually conceived, by our fellows a generation ago, as having sat silent in the heavens for five hundred years. So long had the poor souls of earth had no ear nor heart for voices from the Unseen, the Eternal, the Almighty!

The theory was pathetic. Thank God, it was to flee away before the eyes of the student, like darkness from the face of the dawn. All may now read the wonderful exuberance of literature which that young Judaism—thoughtful, keen, reverent, advancing with a marvellous spirit of progress—produced in those very same five centuries. Intensely devoted the people of this new religion were, determined to get and give knowledge of their God, for themselves and for all peoples. They set in their innermost shrine, beneath the Mercy Seat, the words:—

‘Here will our God ever come to reveal to us more and more of His Mind.’

The purpose of all God’s Providence seemed to them clearly to be this, ‘that all nations might know the character of their God Iahweh.’ They had, indeed, learned that faith from their Hebrew prophet-fathers; but they searched out and exalted their old faiths, editing with many a comment the words of prophets, of narrators, and of poets. They came together in trysted assemblies, and in synagogues all over the world wherever they might be dwelling, to confer,