Ezra

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Ezra was a priest and scribe of the Persian period, remembered in the Hebrew tradition as the man who restored the Law to the Jews returning from exile in Babylon, and remembered again, centuries later, as the seer to whom one of the most searching apocalypses of antiquity was attributed. The two memories are not the same figure, and the distance between them is part of what makes him interesting.

The biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah present him as a scribe “skilled in the law of Moses,” sent from the Persian court to Jerusalem to teach and enforce the Torah among a community rebuilding itself after the destruction of the First Temple. The books describe him reading the Law aloud before the assembled people, interpreting it so they could understand, and pressing reforms that drew sharp lines around the community. Dating him precisely is a long-standing problem: the sources place his mission under a king named Artaxerxes, but which Artaxerxes, and whether he preceded or followed Nehemiah, scholarship has not settled. Some historians treat the figure as substantially historical; others read the Ezra of these books as a portrait shaped by the concerns of the writers who composed them.

Around that uncertain figure grew a much larger one. Later Jewish tradition made Ezra a second Moses — the rabbis held that the Torah, had it not been given through Moses, was worthy to have been given through Ezra, and credited him with re-establishing the written Law, fixing its script, and standing at the head of the chain that transmitted it. A celebrated legend went further: that the scriptures had been lost in the catastrophe, and that Ezra, inspired, dictated them anew. That legend has its fullest form in the apocalypse known as 4 Ezra (preserved within 2 Esdras), written near the end of the first century CE, after a second Temple had fallen to Rome. There the name belongs to a visionary who interrogates God about suffering and the justice of creation, receives a sequence of dream-visions, and at the close is given to drink a fiery cup and dictates ninety-four books — the public scriptures and a set of hidden ones reserved for the wise. The attribution is pseudonymous, the standard practice of the genre; the choice of Ezra’s name was exact, fastening the restorer of the first scriptures to the restoration imagined after the second loss.

It is this apocalyptic Ezra, rather than the administrator of the biblical books, who carried furthest into later esoteric reading: the figure entrusted with books too holy for the crowd, the recipient of revelation under inspiration. The motif of a secret canon set apart for the few would resurface wherever a tradition claimed knowledge held back from common sight. Whether the scribe of the return ever sat among the visionaries who later borrowed his name, the texts do not say.

→ In the library: Charles — Apocrypha & Pseudepigrapha (1913; contains 4 Ezra / 2 Esdras)

→ Related: Zechariah · Deborah · Priest · Sadducees · Gnosis