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Hermeneia
Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Books of Fourth Ezra
Fourth Ezra is a magnificent commentary, the definitive and standard work for generations to come.
520 pages, Hardcover
Published November 9, 1990
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May 12, 2025
I find Peacock’s 2024 streaming series “Those About to Die” a fair-to-middling epic of Roman gladiators under the Flavians. Production values are fine and casting is good, but the series doesn’t rise to the timeless grandeur of its subject. However, it does one thing that’s unique: grant screentime to the 50,000 Jewish slaves building Rome’s monuments after Titus razed Jerusalem in AD 70.
By that time, two-thirds of a millennium had passed since the Babylonian annihilation of Jerusalem. We moderns have no way to comprehend how shattering these twin disasters were to the Jewish psyche. We have no single plot of ground that, by its mere and continued existence, is the linchpin to everything we believe about reality and our place in it.
The Book of Fourth Ezra is one attempt to wrap one Jewish mind around the disintegration of reality, using the persona of Ezra grappling with the Babylonian destruction to grapple with the Roman destruction. Today’s scholarly consensus is that the book was written in Hebrew and translated into Greek (neither extant), making its way thence into surviving Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Latin translations. Though not considered canonical Scripture by either Jewish or Christian traditions, the book enjoyed enough popularity that Ambrose of Milan was especially fond of quoting it.
Michael Edward Stone of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is well suited to write this critical commentary on 4 Ezra, having defended his 1965 doctoral thesis on this book; though I might wish for more felicity in style. Stone operates from the scholarly tradition of disappearing behind the “editorial we” and a lot of passive tense (e.g., “it has already been observed” rather than “I have already observed”). Maybe this scratches an itch for academic humility, but it makes for stilted reading.
Strip away the dry writing, though, and you’ll find the wealth of a lifetime spent studying Second Temple literature. Stone is conversant with every ancient and modern tradition bearing on 4 Ezra’s interpretation. I myself tend to skepticism of source criticism, so I appreciate Stone’s conservative method of marshalling internal evidence (especially of literary craftsmanship) to defend a unitary manuscript despite some incorporation, reworking, and reinterpretation of preexisting material.
Stone interprets 4 Ezra as an exercise in psychological and spiritual transformation after Jerusalem's fall. The book comprises three combative vision dialogues, one waking vision of the heavenly Jerusalem, two dream visions of eschatological revelation, and a final vision audience with God himself. Stone takes this structure as reflective of the author’s own journey from incredulous despair to divine epiphany to comfort and acceptance.
The first three dialogue visions offer existential grievances so universal that we still resonate with them. Who has not objected that offenders are often punished by even worse people (“Are the deeds of those who inhabit Babylon any better?”). Who has never felt the plaint that ours is a sorry lot “to suffer and not understand why we suffer,” or — even worse — to recognize that to some extent we’ve caused our own ruin and thus “we perish and we know it?”
Only after the pivotal vision of a grieving woman who transforms into the heavenly Jerusalem does “Ezra” realize he’s been thinking about this all wrong. God’s judgments are predetermined and just. The heavenly Jerusalem remains forever untouched and untouchable. This radical reorientation prepares “Ezra” to receive a series of revelations about the end of days, including the death of Daniel’s Fourth Beast (i.e., Rome) and the vindication of God’s chosen people.
4 Ezra is similar to other apocalyptic works of its time, especially 2 Apocalypse of Baruch (which Stone cross-references so frequently that it would be a good companion text). Even canonical books such as Daniel and Revelation have their parallels here. In addition to explicit references to Daniel, the righteous souls in God’s treasuries cry out for the end to come and to receive their reward in a scene reminiscent of the Book of Revelation’s martyred souls crying out for justice from beneath the altar.
Yet 4 Ezra is also distinct in that its author begins with traumatized incomprehension of God’s ways. As Stone often comments, most works of Jewish apocalypse purport to offer secret, elite insights into life, the universe, and everything. 4 Ezra instead swerves away from God’s secret things, candidly confessing to personal confusion and ultimately taking solace in God’s unsearchable wisdom and unalterable plan.
4 Ezra is brief enough to read in a single sitting, though a magisterial work like Stone’s is helpful if you don’t mind long stretches of scholastic dissection. It’s useful for those curious about literary and conceptual bridges between the testaments of our modern Bible. Beyond that, it’s a universal and profoundly human book in the sense that we all grapple with pain we don’t understand, we all come to a point of crisis, and we all find our own peace in our own way.
By that time, two-thirds of a millennium had passed since the Babylonian annihilation of Jerusalem. We moderns have no way to comprehend how shattering these twin disasters were to the Jewish psyche. We have no single plot of ground that, by its mere and continued existence, is the linchpin to everything we believe about reality and our place in it.
The Book of Fourth Ezra is one attempt to wrap one Jewish mind around the disintegration of reality, using the persona of Ezra grappling with the Babylonian destruction to grapple with the Roman destruction. Today’s scholarly consensus is that the book was written in Hebrew and translated into Greek (neither extant), making its way thence into surviving Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Latin translations. Though not considered canonical Scripture by either Jewish or Christian traditions, the book enjoyed enough popularity that Ambrose of Milan was especially fond of quoting it.
Michael Edward Stone of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is well suited to write this critical commentary on 4 Ezra, having defended his 1965 doctoral thesis on this book; though I might wish for more felicity in style. Stone operates from the scholarly tradition of disappearing behind the “editorial we” and a lot of passive tense (e.g., “it has already been observed” rather than “I have already observed”). Maybe this scratches an itch for academic humility, but it makes for stilted reading.
Strip away the dry writing, though, and you’ll find the wealth of a lifetime spent studying Second Temple literature. Stone is conversant with every ancient and modern tradition bearing on 4 Ezra’s interpretation. I myself tend to skepticism of source criticism, so I appreciate Stone’s conservative method of marshalling internal evidence (especially of literary craftsmanship) to defend a unitary manuscript despite some incorporation, reworking, and reinterpretation of preexisting material.
Stone interprets 4 Ezra as an exercise in psychological and spiritual transformation after Jerusalem's fall. The book comprises three combative vision dialogues, one waking vision of the heavenly Jerusalem, two dream visions of eschatological revelation, and a final vision audience with God himself. Stone takes this structure as reflective of the author’s own journey from incredulous despair to divine epiphany to comfort and acceptance.
The first three dialogue visions offer existential grievances so universal that we still resonate with them. Who has not objected that offenders are often punished by even worse people (“Are the deeds of those who inhabit Babylon any better?”). Who has never felt the plaint that ours is a sorry lot “to suffer and not understand why we suffer,” or — even worse — to recognize that to some extent we’ve caused our own ruin and thus “we perish and we know it?”
Only after the pivotal vision of a grieving woman who transforms into the heavenly Jerusalem does “Ezra” realize he’s been thinking about this all wrong. God’s judgments are predetermined and just. The heavenly Jerusalem remains forever untouched and untouchable. This radical reorientation prepares “Ezra” to receive a series of revelations about the end of days, including the death of Daniel’s Fourth Beast (i.e., Rome) and the vindication of God’s chosen people.
4 Ezra is similar to other apocalyptic works of its time, especially 2 Apocalypse of Baruch (which Stone cross-references so frequently that it would be a good companion text). Even canonical books such as Daniel and Revelation have their parallels here. In addition to explicit references to Daniel, the righteous souls in God’s treasuries cry out for the end to come and to receive their reward in a scene reminiscent of the Book of Revelation’s martyred souls crying out for justice from beneath the altar.
Yet 4 Ezra is also distinct in that its author begins with traumatized incomprehension of God’s ways. As Stone often comments, most works of Jewish apocalypse purport to offer secret, elite insights into life, the universe, and everything. 4 Ezra instead swerves away from God’s secret things, candidly confessing to personal confusion and ultimately taking solace in God’s unsearchable wisdom and unalterable plan.
4 Ezra is brief enough to read in a single sitting, though a magisterial work like Stone’s is helpful if you don’t mind long stretches of scholastic dissection. It’s useful for those curious about literary and conceptual bridges between the testaments of our modern Bible. Beyond that, it’s a universal and profoundly human book in the sense that we all grapple with pain we don’t understand, we all come to a point of crisis, and we all find our own peace in our own way.
March 27, 2017
Not for the casual reader by any means. The author either assumes great prior familiarity with 4 Ezra or the willingness to check cross references or both. I had to get a copy of 2 Apocalypse Baruch because there were many references made to that book that were not quoted. I don't suspect most people just happen to have a copy of 2 Apoc Bar lying around!
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