Judahite Apocalypse of Ezra

By Scriptural Research Institute

In the early centuries of the Christian era, a number of texts called the Apocalypse of Ezra were in circulation among Jews, Christians, Gnostics, and related religious groups. The original is believed to have been written in Judahite or Aramaic, and is commonly known as the Jewish Apocalypse of Ezra, as Ezra is believed to have been an ancient

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digital Ink Productions
• Release date: Apr 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781989852101

Book preview

Judahite Apocalypse of Ezra

Apocalypses of Ezra, Volume 1

SCRIPTURAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Published by Digital Ink Productions, 2023

COPYRIGHT

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

Judahite Apocalypse of Ezra

Digital edition. November 27, 2023

Copyright © 2023 Scriptural Research Institute.

ISBN: 978-1989852101

The original Apocalypse of Ezra was supposedly written by the prophet Ezra circa 567 BC, likely in Judahite (Paleo-Hebrew) or Aramaic. The Greek translation was in circulation by 200 AD, but is now lost. Latin, Armenian, Geez, Arabic, Georgian, Old Slavonic, and Syriac translations still exist, all believed to have been translated from the Greek version before it was lost. This English translation of the Latin translation, was created by the Scriptural Research Institute in 2020 through 2023.

The image used for the cover is an artistic reinterpretation of ‘Saint Uriel the Archangel’ by Zacarías González Velázquez, painted circa 1800.

Note: The notes for this book include multiple ancient scripts. For your convenience, fonts correctly depicting these scripts are embedded in the ebook. If your reader does not support embedded fonts, you will need to install Unicode fonts that cover the ranges for Brahmi, Cuneiform, Armenian, Eastern Syriac, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Ethiopic, Georgian, Glagolitic, Greek, Hebrew, Imperial Aramaic, Old Persian cuneiform, Old South Arabian, Phoenician, Syriac, and Ugaritic on your reader manually, or you may see blank areas, question marks, or squares where the scripts are used. The Noto fonts from Google cover most of the scripts used, however, will not depict Egyptian hieroglyphs, or Neo-Babylonian cuneiform correctly due to current limitations in Unicode. For a Serto (Western) Syriac font, the Batman font from Beth Mardutho is recommended.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Forward

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Manuscripts

Available Digitally

Available in Print

FORWARD

In the early centuries of the Christian era, a number of texts called the Apocalypse of Ezra were in circulation among Jews, Christians, Gnostics, and related religious groups. The original is believed to have been written in Judahite or Aramaic, and is commonly known as the Jewish Apocalypse of Ezra, as Ezra is believed to have been an ancient Judahite. This translation is referred to as the Judahite Apocalypse of Ezra, as the book has nothing to do with modern Judaism. This version of the Apocalypse was translated into Greek sometime before 200 AD and circulated widely within the early Christian churches. In the book, it is claimed that the prophet Ezra wrote 904 books, and its popularity seems to have inspired many Christian-era Apocalypses of Ezra, presumably beginning with the ‘Latin’ Apocalypse of Ezra which claimed to be the ‘second book of the prophet Ezra.’ This prophet Ezra is not the scribe Ezra from the books of Ezra, but a prophet named Shealtiel who lived a couple of centuries earlier. In the apocalypse, he is called Ezra by the angel Uriel, which translates as ‘helper’ or ‘assistant.’

The Judahite Apocalypse of Ezra was adopted under a variety of names into the Bibles of most older churches before the Protestant Reformation. In the 4th century, it was called 3rd Ezra by Archbishop Ambrose (Aurelius Ambrosius) of Milan, who numbered it in sequence after the 1st and 2nd Ezras from the Septuagint. This name continues to be used in Slavic, Armenian, and Georgian Eastern Orthodox Bibles, however, Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus) rejected the majority of books attributed to Ezra when he translated the original Latin Vulgate Bible. At the time, there were a large number of Apocalypses of Ezra in circulation, most of which had been written recently, and as a result of this confusion, Jerome rejected everything other than the Septuagint’s 2nd Ezra, for which there was a Hebrew translation that could be used for comparison. This book was subsequently split into two books of Ezra and Nehemiah, based on the internal division of the text.

In 1592, Pope Clement VIII’s creation of a Catholic Bible added both 1st and 3rd Ezra into the Catholic Bible under the names 3rd and 4th Esdras. Esdras was the direct Latin transliteration of the Greek version of Ezra’s name: Ἔσδρας. During the Protestant Reformation, the books of 3rd and 4th Esdras were renamed 1st and 2nd Esdras, as they continue to be listed in Protestant Bibles that include them.

Unfortunately, the Latin translation of the Apocalypse of Ezra that Clement added to the Catholic Vulgate included the shorter Latin Apocalypse of Ezra, resulting in the Catholic and Protestant Bibles having longer, and self-contradicting versions of the apocalypse in comparison to Orthodox Bibles. The Latin translation of the Judahite Apocalypse of Ezra did circulate for centuries without the addition of the shorter Latin Apocalypse of Ezra, as evidenced by the Slavonic translation, which is believed to have been translated from Latin and not Greek.

The oldest complete copy of the Judahite Apocalypse is a Syriac manuscript dated to the 6th or 7th centuries, known as Manuscript B.21 Inf. (fols. 267a-276b) at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, Italy. The manuscript contains multiple deviations from the majority of the manuscripts. It is composed in a mixture of two Syriac scripts, the introduction is written in the Esṭrangēlā script, which entered into use in the 1st century AD, while the majority of the main body of the text is composed in the Serṭā script which developed in the 6th century. There are also somewhat random words in the main body written in the older Esṭrangēlā script, which, when coupled with the significant differences in the text, are generally accepted as signs of a major redaction when the Serṭā version was prepared. Serṭā was the main script used by the Jacobite Syrian Church of India, suggesting Manuscript B.21 was a Jacobite Syriac version of the Apocalypse. The older Thomas churches in India had entered into communion with the Church of the East by 500 AD, and remained in communion with the Syrian churches until the schism of 1653. Therefore, the Serṭā edits in the Apocalypse are also sometimes called the Jacobite edits.

The Jacobite lectionaries from the 12th through 15th centuries also include a few quotes from the Apocalypse, indicating it was an accepted Christian text in India at the time. Unfortunately, there are a number of deviations in some of the more disputed terms found in the other manuscripts, for example, not referring to Enoch and Leviathan. This limits the value of comparative analysis between the manuscripts, however, there are also places where it sheds light on how some of the strange terms in the Apocalypse originated.

The Ethiopian version uses another name for the Apocalypse: Ôɨzɨra Sutuảelɨ (ዕዝራ ሱቱኤል), which is derived from the fact that the text claims to have been written by ‘Sutuảelɨ, who is also called Ôɨzɨra.’ Sutuảelɨ is the Ethiopian translation of She'alti'el (שְׁאַלְתִּיאֵל), the name of one of King Jehoiachin’s sons. Jehoiachin was the second last King of Judah before it was conquered by the Babylonians, and was considered the first ‘King of the Exiles’ (ראש גלות‎) in Babylon. His son Shealtiel was the second ‘King of the Exiles,’ and this does correlate with the setting of the Judahite Apocalypse of Ezra. This reference to ‘Shealtiel, who is also called Ezra,’ is found in most translations of the apocalypse, other than the longer Catholic version, where it is both redundant and conflicting, as the author is identified at the beginning of the longer text. The introduction of the Catholic version is the introduction of the shorter Latin Apocalypse of Ezra, which identifies the author as Ezra the Scribe and provides his genealogy. Ezra the Scribe was a Levite, and so his genealogy has nothing to do with the line of David, a