An Atheist Explores the Apocrypha Part Four: In Which Esdras Has A Dream And Asks God Some Difficult Questions (2 Esdras 1-5)
2
Esdras 1-5
In Which Esdras Has A Dream And Asks God Some Difficult Questions.
Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Apocrypha version).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Old Testament Apocrypha, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.
For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/3aEJ6Q5
For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP
And now:
2 Esdras 1
“The second book of the prophet Esdras, the son of Saraias, the son of Azarias, the son of Helchias, the son of Sadamias, the son of Sadoc, the son of Achitob,”
Esdras goes on for another couple of large verses, again giving his lineage back to Aaron, and indicates that this is written during the reign of Ataxerxes.
The word of God comes to Esdras (how, he doesn’t say), and complains yet again about how the Israelites are not upholding their side of the covenant. God goes over all of the help given during the Exodus (omitting the part where He condemns the Israelites to wander for forty years for yet another transgression), and we learn that manna is also “angels’ bread”.
Consequently, because God is huffy with the Israelites, He decides to withdraw all contact with them - “When ye offer unto me, I will turn my face from you: for your solemn feastdays, your new moons, and your circumcisions, have I forsaken”. You’d think that an all-forgiving God would be less, well, petty, but apparently not. It’s a good excuse for a distinct lack of divine intervention and miracles, though.
However, God continues, describing successors to the disobedient lot - “I take to witness the grace of the people to come, whose little ones rejoice in gladness: and though they have not seen me with bodily eyes, yet in spirit they believe the thing that I say”. These will, apparently, come from the East, and so it’s possible here that the reference is to the ex-slaves that will be freed by Cyrus and which we read about in 1 Esdras. Seriously, the chronology is all over the shop. It’s funny how Esdras can enumerate every last gold coin but can’t get his dates straight.
Anyway, these people will be “given for leaders” “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Oseas, Amos, and Micheas, Joel, Abdias, and Jonas, Nahum, and Abacuc, Sophonias, Aggeus, Zachary, and Malachy, which is called also an angel of the Lord”. This is where Esdras would have been helpful before, since, despite alternative spellings, these are all of the minor prophets roughly in the order in which their books are given – Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, Jonah, Nahum, Habbakuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zachariah and Malachi. Interesting that apparently Malachi is an angel. But this explains why those books were included, and also who the authors are supposed to be in terms of their relationship to every thing else going on. I noticed, when comparing, that Obadiah and Daniel were missing, but Daniel was, as I recall, during the early years of Captivity with Nabuchadnezzar and Belshazzar (and is in all likelihood compiled much, much later). Obadiah, I can’t for the life of me recall. (NB I realise on reviewing this that “Abdias” is probably Obadiah).
2 Esdras 2
“Mother, embrace thy children, and bring them up with gladness, make their feet as fast as a pillar: for I have chosen thee, saith the Lord.”
It gets a little confusing at the beginning, with God complaining about “I” but then also offering Jerusalem to Esdras and his people. The intent seems to be that the Kingdom of Israel, those presumably left behind or collaborating with the Babylonians, are forsaken by God, but the Exiles, and possibly those of the Kingdom of Judah instead, have gained the full blessing of God, so the specifics of who are the Chosen People have changed. I’m guessing this is an attempt to give divine endorsement to an earthly power struggle going on at the time.
God gives Esdras what is essentially a renewed covenant, telling the people to “Do right to the widow, judge for the fatherless, give to the poor, defend the orphan, clothe the naked, Heal the broken and the weak, laugh not a lame man to scorn, defend the maimed, and let the blind man come into the sight of my clearness.[…] Wheresoever thou findest the dead, take them and bury them, and I will give thee the first place in my resurrection”.
If all this sounds more New Testament, it gets even more so when Esdras sees a vision of “a young man of a high stature, taller than all the rest, and upon every one of their heads he set crowns, and was more exalted” and is told by an angel that “It is the Son of God, whom they have confessed in the world”. The Son of God is giving people palms in their hands as well – you can see the imagery of Palm Sunday, except that the people took palms for themselves (shh, don’t mention that bit).
Oh, and also Esdras is told that the servants “Esau and Jeremy” will be sent to help (him, or the Exiles, it isn’t clear to me). Jeremy I’ve assumed to be Jeremiah, and it strikes me now – is “Isaiah” an alternative of “Esau”? It’s about as close as some of the alternate spelling in Esdras. (No, doesn’t look like it).
2 Esdras 3
” In the thirtieth year after the ruin of the city I was in Babylon, and lay troubled upon my bed, and my thoughts came up over my heart:”
At this point in the narrative, then, we are thirty years into the seventy year Exile, and it’s clear that Esdras is one of the captives. We don’t know how old he is here, but presumably by the time Cyrus frees the Israelites he’s going to be getting on a bit.
Esdras has a question for God, but first he goes over a summary of all the times that God’s creations have disobeyed him, starting with Adam. There are a couple of theological points here which haven’t, to my memory, come up specifically before. The first is that Adam is created “without soul” until God “breathe[s] into him the breath of life”. It’s not explicit here that the breath of God gives Adam a soul, but I think the meaning is pretty clear. Which means that all the creatures that die in the Flood that have “the breathe of life” presumably also have a soul. I have honestly had a believer try to argue with me that you can see the soul by breathing onto a mirror. It was almost heartbreaking to have to tell them that this was just water vapour.
Also, Paradise was apparently planted by God “before ever the earth came forward”. I’ll leave you to figure out how *that* is supposed to work.
Anyway, Adam disobeys God, then everyone else does so God has to give them all a good Flooding to teach them a lesson. Except that the descendents of Noah end up being “more ungodly than the first”. So that Flood really helped then. I’m sure this isn’t Esdras’ intent, but he ends up making God look pretty incompetent for a supposedly omnipotent being. But maybe in some ways it is, because as we’ll see shortly, these things are giving Esdras doubts.
We move to Abraham, whom God chooses for some reason (I didn’t quite understand the appeal of a guy who cons rulers with the “wife/sister” ploy and would happily kill his own son, but there you go). Next we get to David, and all the time people just keep on disobeying God like He doesn’t really exist or something. There’s a tantalising glimpse of an event where “thy glory went through four gates, of fire, and of earthquake, and of wind, and of cold” during what I assume to be the Exodus, but there’s no further delineation of these events.
Esdras wonders, after all of this, why the faithful ended up being unfaithful, and why God gave their city Jerusalem to the Babylonians. “For I have seen how thou sufferest them sinning, and hast spared wicked doers: and hast destroyed thy people, and hast preserved thine enemies, and hast not signified it”. Why are sinners not punished, and sometimes the blameless get punished? Esdras quite reasonably wonders “Are they then of Babylon better than they of Sion?”
His answer is that, despite their flaws, God will discover that the Israelites have kept to the convenant. Again, you’d think an omnipotent being would already know this, but this is from Esdras’ point of view.
2 Esdras 4
“And I said, Tell on, my lord. Then said he unto me, Go thy way, weigh me the weight of the fire, or measure me the blast of the wind, or call me again the day that is past.”
An Archangel, Uriel, calls upon Esdras in answer to his prayer, and as with 1 Esdras with the contest about who is the greater, the writer of Esdras shows a good command of folk-story tropes and a good ear for storytelling. Uriel offers Esdras three “similitudes” if he can answer three questions, given above. What is the weight of fire? How much is the wind? And bring back yesterday (which isn’t a question, but a command, but never mind).
Of course Esdras can’t do any of these things, and so Uriel points out that if he can’t answer these questions about things that he has experienced, how can he expect to understand anything about Heaven, which he has not? May as well ask, say Uriel, “how great dwellings are in the midst of the sea, or how many springs are in the beginning of the deep, or how many springs are above the firmament, or which are the outgoings of paradise”.
Uriel then tells a parable about the trees and the sea futilely declaring war on one another, “for the ground is given unto the wood, and the sea also hath his place to bear his floods”. This, again, the angel likens to God in His Heaven and man on Earth. But this seems a bit one-sided since, apparently, God can influence and interact with Earth but man cannot hope to understand Heaven. So the metaphor doesn’t quite stand.
Despite Esdras failing to answer, Uriel still gives him the “similitudes”, firstly likening evil deeds to a harvest, because “the grain of evil seed hath been sown in the heart of Adam from the beginning, and how much ungodliness hath it brought up unto this time?” There’s some tortured simile about the wheat grown from the seeds of evil filling the threshing room floor, or something.
There’s a bit which I guess is supposed to refer to some kind of appointed hour of … retribution? Salvation? I’m not sure. And that trying to stop this is as possible as trying to stop a woman giving birth. “In the grave the chambers of souls are like the womb of a woman: For like as a woman that travaileth maketh haste to escape the necessity of the travail: even so do these places haste to deliver those things that are committed unto them”.
Finally Esdras asks if he is closer to the beginning or end of this timeline, and gets some stuff about smoke and raindrops in reply.
1 Esdras 5
“There shall be a confusion also in many places, and the fire shall be oft sent out again, and the wild beasts shall change their places, and menstruous women shall bring forth monsters”
Esdras’ angelic visitor continues to grant Esdras a vision of the future, wherein there are rumours of things going astray, and trees that bleed, and seas make a noise in the night, and friends turn on one another.
When Esdras wakes up he’s unsurprisingly perturbed, and turns away Salathiel, the “captain of the people” who tells him that he’s supposed to be responsible for the people and not to “forsake us […], as the shepherd that leaveth his flock in the hands of cruel wolves”. Esdras ignores him and has a seven day sulk, with fasting. Perhaps not surprisingly again, he has a vision of God with whom he has a good old argument. You’d kind of think not, really. If God is this powerful creator that, as is written in Genesis and Exodus, has a terrifying countenance, I doubt a mortal being would really be able to chastise Him if they were to really encounter Him.
Anyway, Esdras says “So I turns round to God, and I was like…” “And now, O Lord, why hast thou given this one people over unto many? and upon the one root hast thou prepared others, and why hast thou scattered thy only one people among many?”
Before this, Esdras lays a bit of flattery, but also notes how God has chosen the Israelites out of all people in the world, and of all the lands, like choosing a single vine from all the trees in the world. It’s a good point, which further makes the Biblical God seem more than a bit illogical. What, exactly, is with the favouritism?
Uriel the angel turns up to answer – ah, so Esdras wasn’t talking to God face to face, but simply directing his words to God. Gotcha. Uriel does a bit of Job-Lite again, asking such things as “Open me the places that are closed, and bring me forth the winds that in them are shut up, shew me the image of a voice: and then I will declare to thee the thing that thou labourest to know.” As with before, the gist is “You don’t understand, and couldn’t understand”. Esdras then poses a question about why God needs to wait until a specific time to make things happen, when clearly God could make things happen whenever He wanted. Uriel asks if a woman can give birth to all of the children in her lifetime on one go. Except that God is not a mortal woman, God is God. But evidently God is also bound by some kind of time restrictions (despite, apparently, being timeless and eternal), and so things (in this case the freedom from Exile) have to happen in their own time.
So, much like Job, shut up and stop asking difficult questions. Well done, though, to Esdras for posing them in the first place.
In Which Esdras Has A Dream And Asks God Some Difficult Questions.
Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Apocrypha version).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Old Testament Apocrypha, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.
For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/3aEJ6Q5
For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP
And now:
2 Esdras 1
“The second book of the prophet Esdras, the son of Saraias, the son of Azarias, the son of Helchias, the son of Sadamias, the son of Sadoc, the son of Achitob,”
Esdras goes on for another couple of large verses, again giving his lineage back to Aaron, and indicates that this is written during the reign of Ataxerxes.
The word of God comes to Esdras (how, he doesn’t say), and complains yet again about how the Israelites are not upholding their side of the covenant. God goes over all of the help given during the Exodus (omitting the part where He condemns the Israelites to wander for forty years for yet another transgression), and we learn that manna is also “angels’ bread”.
Consequently, because God is huffy with the Israelites, He decides to withdraw all contact with them - “When ye offer unto me, I will turn my face from you: for your solemn feastdays, your new moons, and your circumcisions, have I forsaken”. You’d think that an all-forgiving God would be less, well, petty, but apparently not. It’s a good excuse for a distinct lack of divine intervention and miracles, though.
However, God continues, describing successors to the disobedient lot - “I take to witness the grace of the people to come, whose little ones rejoice in gladness: and though they have not seen me with bodily eyes, yet in spirit they believe the thing that I say”. These will, apparently, come from the East, and so it’s possible here that the reference is to the ex-slaves that will be freed by Cyrus and which we read about in 1 Esdras. Seriously, the chronology is all over the shop. It’s funny how Esdras can enumerate every last gold coin but can’t get his dates straight.
Anyway, these people will be “given for leaders” “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Oseas, Amos, and Micheas, Joel, Abdias, and Jonas, Nahum, and Abacuc, Sophonias, Aggeus, Zachary, and Malachy, which is called also an angel of the Lord”. This is where Esdras would have been helpful before, since, despite alternative spellings, these are all of the minor prophets roughly in the order in which their books are given – Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, Jonah, Nahum, Habbakuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zachariah and Malachi. Interesting that apparently Malachi is an angel. But this explains why those books were included, and also who the authors are supposed to be in terms of their relationship to every thing else going on. I noticed, when comparing, that Obadiah and Daniel were missing, but Daniel was, as I recall, during the early years of Captivity with Nabuchadnezzar and Belshazzar (and is in all likelihood compiled much, much later). Obadiah, I can’t for the life of me recall. (NB I realise on reviewing this that “Abdias” is probably Obadiah).
2 Esdras 2
“Mother, embrace thy children, and bring them up with gladness, make their feet as fast as a pillar: for I have chosen thee, saith the Lord.”
It gets a little confusing at the beginning, with God complaining about “I” but then also offering Jerusalem to Esdras and his people. The intent seems to be that the Kingdom of Israel, those presumably left behind or collaborating with the Babylonians, are forsaken by God, but the Exiles, and possibly those of the Kingdom of Judah instead, have gained the full blessing of God, so the specifics of who are the Chosen People have changed. I’m guessing this is an attempt to give divine endorsement to an earthly power struggle going on at the time.
God gives Esdras what is essentially a renewed covenant, telling the people to “Do right to the widow, judge for the fatherless, give to the poor, defend the orphan, clothe the naked, Heal the broken and the weak, laugh not a lame man to scorn, defend the maimed, and let the blind man come into the sight of my clearness.[…] Wheresoever thou findest the dead, take them and bury them, and I will give thee the first place in my resurrection”.
If all this sounds more New Testament, it gets even more so when Esdras sees a vision of “a young man of a high stature, taller than all the rest, and upon every one of their heads he set crowns, and was more exalted” and is told by an angel that “It is the Son of God, whom they have confessed in the world”. The Son of God is giving people palms in their hands as well – you can see the imagery of Palm Sunday, except that the people took palms for themselves (shh, don’t mention that bit).
Oh, and also Esdras is told that the servants “Esau and Jeremy” will be sent to help (him, or the Exiles, it isn’t clear to me). Jeremy I’ve assumed to be Jeremiah, and it strikes me now – is “Isaiah” an alternative of “Esau”? It’s about as close as some of the alternate spelling in Esdras. (No, doesn’t look like it).
2 Esdras 3
” In the thirtieth year after the ruin of the city I was in Babylon, and lay troubled upon my bed, and my thoughts came up over my heart:”
At this point in the narrative, then, we are thirty years into the seventy year Exile, and it’s clear that Esdras is one of the captives. We don’t know how old he is here, but presumably by the time Cyrus frees the Israelites he’s going to be getting on a bit.
Esdras has a question for God, but first he goes over a summary of all the times that God’s creations have disobeyed him, starting with Adam. There are a couple of theological points here which haven’t, to my memory, come up specifically before. The first is that Adam is created “without soul” until God “breathe[s] into him the breath of life”. It’s not explicit here that the breath of God gives Adam a soul, but I think the meaning is pretty clear. Which means that all the creatures that die in the Flood that have “the breathe of life” presumably also have a soul. I have honestly had a believer try to argue with me that you can see the soul by breathing onto a mirror. It was almost heartbreaking to have to tell them that this was just water vapour.
Also, Paradise was apparently planted by God “before ever the earth came forward”. I’ll leave you to figure out how *that* is supposed to work.
Anyway, Adam disobeys God, then everyone else does so God has to give them all a good Flooding to teach them a lesson. Except that the descendents of Noah end up being “more ungodly than the first”. So that Flood really helped then. I’m sure this isn’t Esdras’ intent, but he ends up making God look pretty incompetent for a supposedly omnipotent being. But maybe in some ways it is, because as we’ll see shortly, these things are giving Esdras doubts.
We move to Abraham, whom God chooses for some reason (I didn’t quite understand the appeal of a guy who cons rulers with the “wife/sister” ploy and would happily kill his own son, but there you go). Next we get to David, and all the time people just keep on disobeying God like He doesn’t really exist or something. There’s a tantalising glimpse of an event where “thy glory went through four gates, of fire, and of earthquake, and of wind, and of cold” during what I assume to be the Exodus, but there’s no further delineation of these events.
Esdras wonders, after all of this, why the faithful ended up being unfaithful, and why God gave their city Jerusalem to the Babylonians. “For I have seen how thou sufferest them sinning, and hast spared wicked doers: and hast destroyed thy people, and hast preserved thine enemies, and hast not signified it”. Why are sinners not punished, and sometimes the blameless get punished? Esdras quite reasonably wonders “Are they then of Babylon better than they of Sion?”
His answer is that, despite their flaws, God will discover that the Israelites have kept to the convenant. Again, you’d think an omnipotent being would already know this, but this is from Esdras’ point of view.
2 Esdras 4
“And I said, Tell on, my lord. Then said he unto me, Go thy way, weigh me the weight of the fire, or measure me the blast of the wind, or call me again the day that is past.”
An Archangel, Uriel, calls upon Esdras in answer to his prayer, and as with 1 Esdras with the contest about who is the greater, the writer of Esdras shows a good command of folk-story tropes and a good ear for storytelling. Uriel offers Esdras three “similitudes” if he can answer three questions, given above. What is the weight of fire? How much is the wind? And bring back yesterday (which isn’t a question, but a command, but never mind).
Of course Esdras can’t do any of these things, and so Uriel points out that if he can’t answer these questions about things that he has experienced, how can he expect to understand anything about Heaven, which he has not? May as well ask, say Uriel, “how great dwellings are in the midst of the sea, or how many springs are in the beginning of the deep, or how many springs are above the firmament, or which are the outgoings of paradise”.
Uriel then tells a parable about the trees and the sea futilely declaring war on one another, “for the ground is given unto the wood, and the sea also hath his place to bear his floods”. This, again, the angel likens to God in His Heaven and man on Earth. But this seems a bit one-sided since, apparently, God can influence and interact with Earth but man cannot hope to understand Heaven. So the metaphor doesn’t quite stand.
Despite Esdras failing to answer, Uriel still gives him the “similitudes”, firstly likening evil deeds to a harvest, because “the grain of evil seed hath been sown in the heart of Adam from the beginning, and how much ungodliness hath it brought up unto this time?” There’s some tortured simile about the wheat grown from the seeds of evil filling the threshing room floor, or something.
There’s a bit which I guess is supposed to refer to some kind of appointed hour of … retribution? Salvation? I’m not sure. And that trying to stop this is as possible as trying to stop a woman giving birth. “In the grave the chambers of souls are like the womb of a woman: For like as a woman that travaileth maketh haste to escape the necessity of the travail: even so do these places haste to deliver those things that are committed unto them”.
Finally Esdras asks if he is closer to the beginning or end of this timeline, and gets some stuff about smoke and raindrops in reply.
1 Esdras 5
“There shall be a confusion also in many places, and the fire shall be oft sent out again, and the wild beasts shall change their places, and menstruous women shall bring forth monsters”
Esdras’ angelic visitor continues to grant Esdras a vision of the future, wherein there are rumours of things going astray, and trees that bleed, and seas make a noise in the night, and friends turn on one another.
When Esdras wakes up he’s unsurprisingly perturbed, and turns away Salathiel, the “captain of the people” who tells him that he’s supposed to be responsible for the people and not to “forsake us […], as the shepherd that leaveth his flock in the hands of cruel wolves”. Esdras ignores him and has a seven day sulk, with fasting. Perhaps not surprisingly again, he has a vision of God with whom he has a good old argument. You’d kind of think not, really. If God is this powerful creator that, as is written in Genesis and Exodus, has a terrifying countenance, I doubt a mortal being would really be able to chastise Him if they were to really encounter Him.
Anyway, Esdras says “So I turns round to God, and I was like…” “And now, O Lord, why hast thou given this one people over unto many? and upon the one root hast thou prepared others, and why hast thou scattered thy only one people among many?”
Before this, Esdras lays a bit of flattery, but also notes how God has chosen the Israelites out of all people in the world, and of all the lands, like choosing a single vine from all the trees in the world. It’s a good point, which further makes the Biblical God seem more than a bit illogical. What, exactly, is with the favouritism?
Uriel the angel turns up to answer – ah, so Esdras wasn’t talking to God face to face, but simply directing his words to God. Gotcha. Uriel does a bit of Job-Lite again, asking such things as “Open me the places that are closed, and bring me forth the winds that in them are shut up, shew me the image of a voice: and then I will declare to thee the thing that thou labourest to know.” As with before, the gist is “You don’t understand, and couldn’t understand”. Esdras then poses a question about why God needs to wait until a specific time to make things happen, when clearly God could make things happen whenever He wanted. Uriel asks if a woman can give birth to all of the children in her lifetime on one go. Except that God is not a mortal woman, God is God. But evidently God is also bound by some kind of time restrictions (despite, apparently, being timeless and eternal), and so things (in this case the freedom from Exile) have to happen in their own time.
So, much like Job, shut up and stop asking difficult questions. Well done, though, to Esdras for posing them in the first place.
Comments
Post a Comment