Confessions of an Esdras addict

It has been roughly four years since I walked into Dr. Glenn Wooden's office at Acadia Divinity College and asked him to suggest a topic for an MA thesis that would involve a Greek translation of an Old Testament book.  He responded "read 1 Esdras, and tell me what you think," and ever since that moment, I have been completely hooked.  Little did I know, even after my thesis on 1 Esdras was written and defended, I would still thinking, rethinking, and researching it.

What follows is a "brief" defence of my admiration and obsession of the old Greek version of the Ezra story.

If you grew up Protestant like me, don't feel bad if you've never heard of 1 Esdras... Luther wasn't a fan, so we don't have it in our version of the Bible.  It does appear in the Orthodox Bible and in the Catholic Bible as III Ezra.  The first century Jewish historian Josephus used 1 Esdras as a source, and it was widely quoted by many of the early church fathers.

Let's be honest; those guys quoted from a lot of books that I don't really care about.  But 1 Esdras is different.

The Basics

By and large, 1 Esdras follows the canonical book of Ezra with a few additions and omissions, begins with Josiah's passover (2 Chronicles 35-36), and leaves out any mention of Nehemiah and the rebuilding of Jerusalem.  The language of 1 Esdras is Greek although it was translated from a lost Hebrew/Aramaic original.  But since 1 Esdras isn't the exact same as Ezra, scholars have debated whether the lost original would represent an earlier or a later form of the Ezra story.

The Translation

There are some very interesting features to the Greek of 1 Esdras.  Besides the vocabulary which is largely distinct from that in the Septuagint, the translator chose to represent antiquated places and procedures with contemporary ones his readers would have understood.  For example, the Persian province of Beyond-The-River (Israel and Syria) was updated to the Ptolemaic province of Coele-Phoenicia and Syria.  Also, instead of Ezra gathering a crowd at the city gates to read the torah (the practice in ancient Israel), the translator changes it so Ezra gathers the crowd at the temple gates (the practice in ancient Egypt).

Why it is Interesting

Let me begin by saying why the Septuagint in general is interesting -- it is possibly the world's first EVER large scale translation.  That means that in some way, the choices and traditions established by those translators have been perpetuated for the last two millennia.  That's cool!

Because the translation method of 1 Esdras diverges from that of the Septuagint, there are some rather nifty conclusions to which one can leap.
1) "Literalness" in a translation has been a sign of reverence for the parent text, so maybe Ezra wasn't considered scripture at the time of translation (200BC give or take).
2) Perhaps 1 Esdras doesn't follow the translation method of the Septuagint because it was translated before the Septuagint.
3) Since the translator contemporizes the text, maybe his target audience was non-Jewish.

Those three conclusions might be a little far fetched, but a highly respected scholar of second temple Judaism, Lester Grabbe, sees 1 Esdras as a tradition separate from the "Biblical" Ezra.  Therefore, if nothing else, 1 Esdras recalls a time before the "canonization" or crystallization of the Old Testament.

And that is super cool.