2 Esdras 3: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

In the thirtieth year after the ruin of the city, the speaker lies troubled on his bed in Babylon, seeing Zion in ruins and Babylon rich, and he speaks to the Most High. He retells the making of Adam, Adam's breaking of the command and the death appointed for him and his descendants, the flood, Noah, the choosing of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Esau, the giving of the law at Sinai, and the city David was told to build, saying that the wicked heart was never taken away, so the good departed and the evil remained. He then asks whether the deeds of those who live in Babylon are any better, that Babylon should rule over Zion, and he asks God to weigh the wrongdoing of Israel and of the rest of the world in the scales.

Claim by Claim

1. 3:1
   • It was the thirtieth year after the ruin of the city.
   • The speaker was in Babylon.
   • The speaker lay troubled upon his bed.
   • The speaker's thoughts came up over his heart.
2. 3:2
   • The speaker had seen the desolation of Zion.
   • The speaker had seen the wealth of those who dwelt at Babylon.
3. 3:3
   • The speaker's spirit was sorely moved.
   • The speaker began to speak words full of fear to the Most High.
   • The speaker spoke.
4. 3:4
   • The speaker addressed the Lord as the one who bears rule.
   • God spoke at the beginning.
   • God planted the earth.
   • God did this by himself alone.
   • God gave a command to the people.
5. 3:5
   • God gave Adam a body without a soul.
   • That body was the workmanship of God's hands.
   • God breathed the breath of life into him.
   • He was made living before God.
6. 3:6
   • God led him into paradise.
   • God's right hand had planted that paradise.
   • The planting happened before the earth ever came forward.
7. 3:7
   • God gave him a commandment to love God's way.
   • He transgressed that commandment.
   • God immediately appointed death in him.
   • God appointed death in his generations.
   • From him came nations, tribes, peoples, and kindreds.
   • Those nations, tribes, peoples, and kindreds were beyond number.
8. 3:8
   • Every people walked after its own will.
   • They acted ungodly before God.
   • They despised God's commandments.
9. 3:9
   • Again in the course of time God brought the flood upon those who dwelt in the world.
   • God destroyed them.
10. 3:10
    • What happened to Adam happened likewise to them.
    • As death came to Adam, so the flood came to these.
11. 3:11
    • God left one of them, namely Noah, with his household.
    • From Noah came all righteous men.
12. 3:12
    • Those who dwelt upon the earth began to multiply.
    • They got themselves many children.
    • They became a great people.
    • They began again to be more ungodly than the earlier ones.
13. 3:13
    • They lived wickedly before God.
    • God chose for himself a man from among them.
    • That man's name was Abraham.
14. 3:14
    • God loved Abraham.
    • God showed his will to Abraham alone.
15. 3:15
    • God made an everlasting covenant with Abraham.
    • God promised Abraham that he would never forsake Abraham's seed.
16. 3:16
    • God gave Isaac to Abraham.
    • God gave Jacob and Esau to Isaac.
    • God chose Jacob for himself.
    • God set Esau aside.
    • Jacob became a great multitude.
17. 3:17
    • God led Jacob's seed out of Egypt.
    • God brought them up to Mount Sinai.
18. 3:18
    • God bowed the heavens.
    • God set the earth fast.
    • God moved the whole world.
    • God made the depths tremble.
    • God troubled that age.
19. 3:19
    • God's glory passed through four gates.
    • The four gates were fire, earthquake, wind, and cold.
    • The purpose was that God might give the law to the seed of Jacob.
    • The purpose was that God might give the commandment to the generation of Israel.
20. 3:20
    • God did not take the wicked heart away from them.
    • Had the wicked heart been taken away, God's law would have brought forth fruit in them.
21. 3:21
    • The first Adam bore a wicked heart.
    • The first Adam transgressed.
    • The first Adam was overcome.
    • All who are born of Adam are likewise transgressors and overcome.
22. 3:22
    • Infirmity was made permanent.
    • The law was in the heart of the people together with the malignity of the root.
    • The good departed away.
    • The evil remained.
23. 3:23
    • The times passed away.
    • The years were brought to an end.
    • God raised up for himself a servant called David.
24. 3:24
    • God commanded David to build a city to God's name.
    • God commanded David to offer incense and oblations to God in that city.
25. 3:25
    • This continued for many years.
    • Those who inhabited the city forsook God.
26. 3:26
    • In all things they did as Adam and all his generations had done.
    • They also had a wicked heart.
27. 3:27
    • God gave his city over into the hands of his enemies.
28. 3:28
    • The speaker asks whether the deeds of those who inhabit Babylon are any better.
    • The speaker asks whether that is why Babylon should have dominion over Zion.
29. 3:29
    • The speaker came to that place.
    • The speaker saw impieties beyond number.
    • The speaker's soul saw many evildoers in this thirtieth year.
    • The speaker's heart failed him.
30. 3:30
    • The speaker has seen that God endures them while they sin.
    • God has spared wicked doers.
    • God has destroyed his own people.
    • God has preserved his enemies.
    • God has not made this known.
31. 3:31
    • The speaker does not remember how this way is to be forsaken.
    • The speaker asks whether those of Babylon are better than those of Zion.
32. 3:32
    • The speaker asks whether any other people knows God besides Israel.
    • The speaker asks what generation has believed God's covenants as Jacob did.
33. 3:33
    • The reward of these does not appear.
    • Their labour has no fruit.
    • The speaker has gone here and there among the heathen.
    • The speaker sees that the heathen abound in wealth.
    • The heathen do not think upon God's commandments.
34. 3:34
    • The speaker asks God to weigh their wickedness in the balance.
    • The speaker asks God to weigh also the wickedness of those who dwell in the world.
    • The speaker says that then God's name will be found nowhere except in Israel.
35. 3:35
    • The speaker asks when it ever was that those who dwell upon the earth have not sinned in God's sight.
    • The speaker asks what people has kept God's commandments so well.
36. 3:36
    • God will find that Israel by name has kept his precepts.
    • God will not find that the heathen have kept his precepts.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

3:1

The city is Jerusalem, destroyed by the Babylonian army in 587 BC, so "the thirtieth year after the ruin of the city" sets the scene around 557 BC, among the Judeans deported to Babylon. In the Greek and Latin copies the speaker names himself at this point as Salathiel, also called Esdras; Esdras is the Latin form of the name Ezra. "My thoughts came up over my heart" is a Hebrew way of saying that thoughts welled up in him and would not let him rest.

3:2

Zion was first the name of one hill in Jerusalem and came to stand for the whole city and its people. Readers in the author's own day would also have heard "Babylon" as a covered name for Rome, the empire that destroyed Jerusalem a second time in AD 70; the book places its complaint in the older exile in order to speak about the newer one.

3:3

"The most High" is a name for God. It means the one who is above everything and everyone.

3:4

KJV "commandedst the people" reflects one reading of the text. Most Latin copies read that God commanded the dust, and the dust then yielded Adam's body, which is why the rendering has "a command to the dust."

3:5

The wording retraces Genesis 2:7, where God shapes a man out of the ground and the shaped body becomes alive only when God breathes into it. "Body without soul" means a formed body that is not yet breathing or living.

3:6

KJV "paradise" comes through Greek from a Persian word for a walled park or pleasure garden; the Greek Bible uses it for the garden of Eden. "Thy right hand" is a standard way of saying God's own hand and power, the right hand being the working, stronger one.

3:7

The command in view is the one in Genesis 2:17, forbidding the fruit of a single tree. "His generations" means the line of people descended from him.

3:8

In 1611 "wonderful" meant astonishing, causing wonder, with no suggestion of admirable; here the astonishing deeds are bad ones. Other copies of the text read "ungodly things," which the rendering follows.

3:9

The flood is the story in Genesis. Water covered the earth, and only the people and animals inside Noah's big boat lived.

3:11

In Genesis the household saved in the ark is eight people: Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives.

3:13

Abraham lived long before this. The Bible says God told him to leave his country, and Israel traced its whole family line back to him.

3:14

KJV "shewedst thy will" follows one reading. Other copies say that God showed Abraham the end of the times, secretly, by night, an allusion to the night vision of Genesis 15.

3:15

A covenant is a binding agreement with set terms and obligations, the ordinary word for a treaty between kings or a contract between people. The one meant here is the promise to Abraham of land and descendants in Genesis 15 and 17. KJV "seed" means offspring, the whole line of descendants.

3:16

Esau was the elder of the twins, so by custom the family position and the larger share of the inheritance were his. KJV "put by" means set aside or passed over; the stories in Genesis 25 and 27 turn on the reversal of the usual order between the two brothers.

3:17

The reference is to the escape from Egypt told in Exodus, and to Mount Sinai in the desert of the Sinai peninsula, where Exodus places the giving of the law.

3:18

"Bowing the heavens" is a set image from the Psalms, for example Psalm 18:9, where God bends the sky down like a curtain in order to come down himself. KJV "didst set fast the earth," that is, made it firm, follows one reading; most Latin copies have God shaking the earth, which fits the other verbs of upheaval around it.

3:19

The four gates are the phenomena that accompany the appearance at Sinai in Exodus 19:16 to 18: fire, a quaking mountain, wind and, in some copies here, ice rather than cold. KJV "diligence unto the generation of Israel" is awkward; other copies read "the commandment," the sense being the law itself given to Israel's descendants.

3:20

"A wicked heart" translates a fixed phrase in this book, the Latin cor malignum. It names an inborn bent toward wrong that a person carries from birth, close to what Jewish writers of the period called the evil inclination. The heart, in this way of speaking, is the seat of thought and decision rather than of feeling.

3:21

"The first Adam" means the first human being. The name Adam is also the ordinary Hebrew word for a person.

3:22

KJV "infirmity" means sickness or weakness, here treated as a permanent condition rather than a passing illness. "The root" means the source or origin, the flaw inherited from the first man. KJV "abode still" means remained in place.

3:23

David was Israel's most famous king. He captured Jerusalem and made it his capital city.

3:24

In the Hebrew Bible David captures Jerusalem and gathers materials, and his son Solomon builds the temple; this book credits the command to David directly. Incense was fragrant resin burned on an altar so that its smoke rose; KJV "oblations" means gifts presented to God, chiefly animals and grain. Some copies read "burnt offerings" instead of incense.

3:27

The handing over is the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem in 587 BC, when the walls were breached, the temple burned and the leading families deported.

3:29

"My heart gave up inside me" means he felt too sad and tired to hope.

3:30

KJV "hast not signified it" means has given no sign and offered no explanation. In the Latin the sentence runs on into the next verse: you have not shown anyone how your way is to be understood.

3:31

KJV "I do not remember how this way may be left" is obscure, and the Latin behind it is damaged or corrupt at this point. The sense is roughly that the speaker cannot see how God's way of running the world is to be grasped. Translations differ here, and the rendering keeps the difficulty rather than smoothing it away.

3:32

Your promises means the agreements God made with his people. Jacob's family grew into the people called Israel.

3:33

KJV "the heathen" simply translates the ordinary word for the other nations, the peoples who are not Israel. It carries no suggestion of savagery or of being uncivilized. "Their labour hath no fruit" means their hard work produces no return.

3:34

A balance was a beam with a pan hanging from each end, used for weighing goods and coin, and it was the standard image for judgment, one side set against the other to see which sinks. The closing clause differs across the copies: KJV has "so shall thy name no where be found but in Israel," while the Latin more often reads that it will then be seen which way the scale tips.

3:36

The point turns on individuals against nations. KJV "Israel by name" follows one reading; the Latin more often runs, you will find men here and there, name by name, who have kept your rules, but you will not find a whole nation that has.