Syriac Apocalypse of Ezra and the Arabic Apocalypse of Daniel

By Scriptural Research Institute

The Syriac Apocalypse of Ezra, sometimes called the Revelation of Ezra appears to have been reworked in the High Middle Ages. Another version of the apocalypse has survived in Arabic, but attributed to Daniel not Ezra, commonly known as the Arabic Apocalypse of Daniel. The Arabic version is shorter and appears to be older, likely dating to earli

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digital Ink Productions
• Release date: Oct 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739069162

Book preview

Syriac Apocalypse of Ezra

and the Arabic Apocalypse of Daniel

Apocalypses of Ezra, Volume 5

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.

Syriac Apocalypse of Ezra and the Arabic Apocalypse of Daniel

Digital edition. November 28, 2023

Copyright © 2023 Scriptural Research Institute.

ISBN: 978-1-7390691-6-2

The Syriac Apocalypse of Ezra and the Arabic Apocalypse of Daniel are considered two versions same apocalypse, although their origin is debated. The oldest manuscript of the Syriac Apocalypse of Ezra dates to 1702, and the oldest manuscript of the Arabic Apocalypse of Daniel dates to 1606. These English translations were created by the Scriptural Research Institute in 2023, primarily from the digitized Mingana 11 manuscript, available online from the Institute of Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) at the University of Birmingham, and the Arabic print of BnF Arabe 150, labeled as ‘Paris Ms. 107,’ published in Hebraica in 1887.

The image used for the cover is an artistic reinterpretation of ‘Death on the Pale Horse’ by Benjamin West, painted circa 1796.

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 Arabic, Cuneiform, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Greek, Hebrew, Imperial Aramaic, Old North Arabian, Old Persian cuneiform, Phoenician, and Syriac (Eastern) 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 Neo-Babylonian cuneiform correctly due to current limitations in Unicode.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Forward

Syriac Apocalypse of Ezra

Arabic Apocalypse of Daniel

Reconstructed Apocalypse of Azariah

Manuscripts

Available Digitally

Available in Print

FORWARD

In the early centuries of the Christian era, several 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 Judahite Apocalypse of Ezra, as Ezra is believed to have been an ancient Judahite. This version of the Apocalypse was translated into Greek sometime before 200 AD and circulated widely within the early Christian churches. This prophet Ezra is not the scribe Ezra from the Septuagint’s books of Ezra or the Masoretic book of Ezra-Nehemiah, but the Judahite exilarch Shealtiel who lived a couple of centuries earlier. In the apocalypse, he is called Ezra by the messenger Uriel, which translates as ‘helper’ or ‘assistant.’ In the book, it is claimed that the prophet Ezra wrote 904 books, and its popularity seems to have inspired several Christian-era Apocalypses of Ezra, presumably beginning with the ‘Latin’ Apocalypse of Ezra which claimed to be the ‘second book of the prophet Ezra.’ The ‘second apocalypse’ was strangely attributed to Ezra the Scribe, and not the earlier exilarch Shealtiel, suggesting the author of the second apocalypse was not entirely familiar with the first apocalypse.

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 Slavic, Georgian, and Armenian 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 Old Slavonic translation, which is believed to have been translated from Latin and not Greek.

The Syriac Apocalypse of Ezra is a separate apocalypse, also sometimes called the Revelation of Ezra. Like the Catholic Apocalypse of Ezra, it appears to have been reworked in the High Middle Ages. Another version of the apocalypse has survived in Arabic, but is attributed to Daniel not Ezra, commonly known as the Arabic Apocalypse of Daniel. The Arabic version is shorter and appears to be older, likely dating to earlier than the time of Muhammad, while the Syriac version has been reworked into an anti-Islamic apocalypse, likely between 1229 and 1244. The apocalypse includes a reference from the High Middle Ages to Muslims as Ishmaelites, and Mongols as Gog and Magog, forming an alliance and conquering Jerusalem. This idea would not have been conceivable until the Mongols defeated the Khwarazmian Empire, an Islamic Turko-Persian empire in Iran and Central Asia. Before that, the idea that the Mongols could reach Jerusalem was not a consideration.

The Apocalypse indicates that the city of Jerusalem was occupied by Christians at the time, which would place the anti-Islamic redaction sometime between 1229 and 1244. The Latin crusaders had been driven out of Jerusalem in 1187, however, the kingdom of Jerusalem continued to exist, first from its capital in Tyre, and later Acre, however, in 1229 Jerusalem was recaptured, and held until 1244. As the Principality of Antioch was another crusader state to the north, and the name ‘Antioch’ appears to have been added earlier in the Apocalypse, the redactor may have meant it as a piece of propaganda intended to garner support from Byzantine Christians, who had not generally participated in the crusades and had better relations with the Muslims than the Catholics.

The older Arabic version of the apocalypse likewise appears to have been used for propaganda, however, was anti-Jewish instead of anti-Islamic, and appears to have been translated into Arabic before the time of Muhammad. Based on the dialect of Arabic, it most likely originated in Palestine among early Christians. The Arabic version is much shorter and is mostly paraphrased from the Gospels and other early Christian works, however, the content of the apocalypse is clearly something that was incorporated into the longer Syriac Apocalypse. While the content of the Arabic apocalypse is repeated in the Syriac apocalypse, it is not a direct translation, but a series of paraphrases that are reinterpreted in an anti-Islamic way. Nevertheless, while the longer Syriac apocalypse must originate much later than the pre-Islamic Arabic apocalypse, it has much more content, most of which appears to have been composed in Neo-Babylonian sometime between 597 and 592 BC.

The Syriac apocalypse has many Greek loanwords, confirming it was written in Greek, as well as an Arabic word the Syriac translator chose over a Syriac word, suggesting the Syriac translation was done long after Northern Iraq became Arabic speaking. All known copies of the Syriac Apocalypse can be traced to Iraqi Kurdistan, or the old Christian churches of Mosul, just south of Kurdistan. All of the surviving manuscripts are also in the Eastern Syriac script, and ten of the known 15 manuscripts can be linked to the Rabban Hormizd Monastery, of the Chaldean Catholic church, suggesting that all known copies are derived from the texts maintained at that monastery.

The oldest known manuscript is from 1702 and is known as MS Mingana Syriac 11, or simplified to Mingana 11. It was copied on January 16, 1702, by a Hoshabo, son of Daniel, son of Joseph the priest, son of Hoshabo, and bought by Alphonse Mingana in the 1920s. Minanga was a British orientalist who had been born in Ottoman Kurdistan, and in the 1920s made multiple trips to northern Iraq to acquire ancient manuscripts, which later became the Mingana Collection at the University of Birmingham, in England. The Syriac apocalypse was commented on by European theologians in the early 1700s. Giuseppe Simone Assemani noted in the Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana that the Apocalypse could not date back to Ezra’s time, as it mentioned Constantine. This view still dominates academic analysis of the text, and almost all scholars who have bothered to publish their views of the Apocalypse interpret it as a medieval Christian anti-Islamic text.

In 1887, Ludwig Iselin broke with this tradition, by claiming it was a reworking of a pre-Christian apocalypse, written in Aramaic. His argument was based on the parallel between the four kings bound on the Euphrates in the Syriac Apocalypse and the four messengers bound in the Euphrates in John’s Apocalypse. The words mlkyả (𐡌𐡋𐡊𐡉𐡀), meaning ‘kings,’ and mlảkyả (𐡌𐡋𐡀𐡊𐡉𐡀), meaning ‘messengers,’ are spelled very similar in Aramaic, and Iselin’s argument was that the author of John’s apocalypse had misunderstood a reference in an older Apocalypse. This was rejected by Christian theologians, who argued that John was seeing an original apocalypse