1 Esdras

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1 Esdras is a Greek book of the wider Old Testament tradition that retells the fall of Jerusalem, the Babylonian exile, and the return and rebuilding under Persian rule. Most of its content overlaps closely with passages already found in 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah; for long stretches it reads as an alternative Greek version of the same events, sometimes in a different order. It survives as part of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, where it stands beside the canonical Greek Ezra under a confusing tangle of names.

The names are worth untangling, because they shift from one tradition to another. In the Septuagint this book is Esdras A (the “first” Ezra); in the Latin Vulgate tradition it was numbered 3 Esdras and, in the later Clementine edition, relegated to an appendix, the Vulgate reserving 1 and 2 for the canonical Ezra–Nehemiah. The Eastern Orthodox churches receive it as scripture; Roman Catholicism treats it as apocryphal; the Protestant Apocrypha prints it as 1 Esdras. Behind the numbering lies a single fact: this is a parallel, partly independent telling of material the Hebrew Bible also preserves.

What sets the book apart is one passage with no Hebrew counterpart — the tale sometimes called the Story of the Three Guardsmen. Three young men of the Persian king’s bodyguard hold a contest to name the strongest thing in the world. One argues for wine, one for the king, and the third — identified as Zerubbabel, who would lead the return — argues first for women and then, rising past them, for truth, which the assembly acclaims as mightiest of all. The king rewards him with leave to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. The episode is the book’s most quoted, and its placement reframes the return as the prize won by a wise man’s speech.

Scholarship has long debated what 1 Esdras actually is. Some hold it a fresh Greek translation made from a Hebrew or Aramaic original, possibly preserving an older arrangement of the Ezra material — its Greek is generally judged more fluent than that of the canonical Greek Ezra, which tells in their favor; others read it as a reworking of the canonical Greek text, the guardsmen story inserted to give the whole a literary spine. The question is unsettled, and bears on how the Ezra–Nehemiah tradition took the shape it now has.

For the traditions that received it, the book carried weight beyond its overlaps. Early Christian writers quoted the guardsmen episode, and the line that truth is strongest and outlasts all things passed into Christian use as a maxim. A text largely duplicating older scripture thus left its own mark, on the strength of the few pages found nowhere else.

→ In the library: Charles — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913)

→ Related: Pentateuch · Letter Of Jeremiah · Book Of Jubilees