Text, Canon and Afterlife

Second Esdras survives not in Greek but chiefly in Latin and in several other ancient versions (Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian and others), the original Hebrew or Greek having been lost. Its canonical status is marginal everywhere. It was not received as canonical by the rabbis, nor by the Eastern Orthodox in the strict sense, nor defined as deuterocanonical by the Roman Catholic Council of Trent; in the Latin tradition it was relegated, with the other non-canonical Esdras books, to an appendix to the Vulgate, printed after the New Testament so as not to be lost.

Protestant Bibles that include the Apocrypha print it as 2 Esdras. Despite this marginal status the book was widely read and loved in medieval Christianity: it is the source of the liturgical antiphon "Requiem aeternam," the "rest eternal" prayed for the dead, and its brooding meditation on suffering and theodicy gave it lasting spiritual weight. Modern scholars prize 4 Ezra as one of the most profound Jewish responses to the trauma of 70 CE and as a key witness to Jewish apocalyptic and messianic thought at the end of the Second Temple period.