1 Esdras: What Is Strongest

At a Glance

Who wrote it: An unknown Jewish writer, in Greek. Most of the book is a retelling of the end of 2 Chronicles, the book of Ezra and part of Nehemiah. One story in the middle is found nowhere else.

When: Probably the 100s BC, perhaps in Egypt. The historian Josephus followed it closely when he told this part of my people’s history at the end of the first century AD.

Where it fits: It runs from King Josiah’s Passover in 622 BC, through the fall of Jerusalem and the exile, to the return under the Persian kings and Ezra’s reading of the law, about 450 BC.

Which Bibles keep it: The Orthodox churches. Catholic Bibles moved it to an appendix in the 1500s and then dropped it. The 1611 King James printed it among the Apocrypha.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Almost all of it is the story of 2 Chronicles 35–36, Ezra and Nehemiah 8, told again. The New Testament never quotes it.

How close it stays to me: Close in putting truth above kings. Far in sending away foreign wives and their children.

If you only read three chapters: 1 Esdras 3, 1 Esdras 4 and 1 Esdras 9.

Words to Know

Esdras — the Greek form of the name Ezra.

Zerubbabel — a grandson of Jehoiachin, one of the last kings of Judah, who led a group of exiles home from Babylon and began rebuilding the Temple.

Darius — Darius I, king of Persia from 522 to 486 BC, in whose reign the second Temple was finished.

The Septuagint — the Greek translation of my people’s scriptures, made in Egypt in the centuries before my birth. Many of the books in this volume were part of it.

The Book in Brief

The book opens with King Josiah keeping a great Passover in Jerusalem and then dying in battle against the king of Egypt. In chapter 1 the last kings of Judah follow, one after another, until the Babylonians burn the Temple and carry the people away.

In chapter 2 Cyrus of Persia lets the exiles go home and sends back the Temple vessels, and enemies in the land write to a later king to stop the rebuilding.

Chapters 3 and 4 tell a story that is in no other book. Three young bodyguards of King Darius hold a contest to say what is strongest. The first says wine, the second the king, the third women, and then truth above all. The third guard wins, and he turns out to be Zerubbabel. For his prize he asks the king to keep his vow to rebuild Jerusalem.

In chapters 5 to 7 the exiles return with Zerubbabel, list their families, build the altar and lay the Temple’s foundation, face opposition, and finish the Temple under Darius.

In chapters 8 and 9 Ezra comes from Babylon with the law. He finds that many men have married foreign women. The people swear to send away those wives and their children, and they do. The book ends with Ezra reading the law aloud to the people in Jerusalem, and the people going home to feast and to send portions to those who have nothing.

The king was asleep. The three young men who guarded him had to stay awake, and they made a game of it. Each would write down one thing he thought was strongest, put it under the king’s pillow, and let the king and his three Persian princes judge in the morning.

The first wrote, Wine is the strongest. The second wrote, The king is strongest. The third wrote, Women are strongest: but above all things Truth bears away the victory (1 Esdras 3:10–12).

That story is the reason this book is worth your time. Most of the rest you can read in your own Bible. This one you cannot.

A history told twice

Your Bible tells the end of the kingdom of Judah and the return from exile in three books: the end of 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. 1 Esdras tells the same story again, in Greek, in a slightly different order and with that one story added.¹

It is a muddle in places. Letters to the Persian king Artaxerxes, who reigned after Darius, come before the story about Darius. A scholar would say the book cares more about the story than the calendar, and that is fair.

In my time, this was a well-known book. The Jewish historian Josephus, born a few years after I died, wrote a long history of my people. When he came to the return from exile, he followed 1 Esdras, not your book of Ezra, and he told the contest of the three bodyguards in full.²

Go deeperFour books called Esdras

If you try to look this book up, you will run into a tangle of names. Here is how it works.

There are four books with the name Ezra, or Esdras, on them. Two are in your Bible as Ezra and Nehemiah. In the old Greek Bible they were counted as one book. The other two are this one, a Greek retelling of the history, and a book of visions written after my death, which has its own chapter in this volume.

The Greek Bible called this book Esdras A and the Hebrew Ezra–Nehemiah Esdras B. Jerome’s Latin Bible named Ezra and Nehemiah 1 and 2 Esdras, which pushed this book to 3 Esdras and the book of visions to 4 Esdras. English Bibles, starting with the Geneva Bible of 1560 and then the King James of 1611, used still another system: for them, this book was 1 Esdras and the book of visions was 2 Esdras. That is the system in this volume.³

The churches split over it too. The Council of Trent, in 1546, left both of these Esdras books out of the Catholic list of scripture, along with the Prayer of Manasseh, and the official Catholic Bible of 1592 printed them in an appendix at the back “so that they would not perish entirely.” The Church of England listed them among the books to be read for example of life, but not to prove any doctrine. The Orthodox churches kept this book in their Bibles.³

Wine, the king, women and truth

Read the speeches. They are funnier and sharper than you might expect from an old book.

The first guard says wine is strongest, because it makes the mind of the king and of the fatherless child to be all one; of the bondman and of the freeman, of the poor man and of the rich (1 Esdras 3:19). A drunk king and a drunk orphan are the same man. And when men are drunk, a little after draw their swords (1 Esdras 3:22).

The second says the king is strongest, and listen to what he means by strength. If he bid them make war the one against the other, they do it (1 Esdras 4:4). They kill and are slain, and bring the plunder home to him (1 Esdras 4:5). The farmers, when they have reaped again that which they had sown, they bring it to the king (1 Esdras 4:6). And he is but one man (1 Esdras 4:7). He eats, drinks and sleeps, and the rest of the world stands guard and pays.

That is an accurate description of a king from someone who stood next to one. It is also the world I was born into, where the harvest of the farmer was carried off to pay the men at the top.

The third guard says women are stronger, because even the king was born of a woman, and a man will gather gold and silver and let it all go for a woman he loves. He tells the court he has seen the king’s own concubine take the crown off his head and put it on her own, while the king grinned at her (1 Esdras 4:29–31).

Then he turns to truth.

Great is truth

Wine is unrighteous, the king is unrighteous, women are unrighteous, all the children of men are unrighteous (1 Esdras 4:37). Everything the others named will pass away. But truth remains, and is strong forever; she lives and conquers forevermore (1 Esdras 4:38).

And here is the line I want you to notice. With her there is no accepting of persons or rewards (1 Esdras 4:39). Truth does not care who you are. It does not take bribes. It does not bow to rank.

When the people heard it, they shouted, Great is truth, and strong above all things (1 Esdras 4:41). In Latin that cry became a famous saying, Magna est veritas, et praevalet: truth is great, and it prevails.⁴

Think about who is speaking. A young servant of an empire, standing in front of the most powerful man in the world, tells him to his face that the king is not the strongest thing. Then he asks for his prize: not a gold chain or a seat by the king, but that the king keep his promise to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple that had been burned when Judea was laid waste (1 Esdras 4:43–46).

When the questioners came to trap me over taxes, they began by flattering me: we know that you are honest, and don’t defer to anyone; for you aren’t partial to anyone (Mark 12:14). They meant it as a trick, but it was the same praise the third guard gave truth. Truth does not take sides by rank.

Go deeperDid a bodyguard become a prince?

In this book, the third guard is Zerubbabel, the prince of the line of David who led the exiles home and laid the foundation of the second Temple. That is where the story becomes hard to believe as history.

The book of Ezra says Zerubbabel came home under Cyrus, years before Darius was king (Ezra 2:2; 3:8). Even 1 Esdras, a chapter after the contest, has him laying the Temple’s foundation and then held up all the time that King Cyrus lived … until the reign of Darius (1 Esdras 5:73). He cannot also have been a young bodyguard in Darius’s bedchamber, winning the right to go home. Most scholars think the contest was an older story, a tale of a wisdom contest at a king’s court, and that the writer gave the winner Zerubbabel’s name to tie it into the history. The only place the story names him is a short aside in the middle of a sentence: (this was Zorobabel) (1 Esdras 4:13). Everywhere else he is simply the young man.⁵

That does not make the story useless. It makes it a parable, a story told to make a point. My people told many stories of a faithful Jew at a foreign court who outwits the king’s wise men: Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon, Esther in Persia. This one belongs with them. Its point is not what happened one night in Darius’s bedchamber. Its point is what is stronger than a king.

The wives who were sent away

The book ends with something much harder.

Ezra comes from Babylon with the law of Moses and finds that many of the men who returned have married women of the peoples of the land. The men confess: we have married strange women of the heathen of the land (1 Esdras 8:92). Ezra tells them to separate yourselves from the heathen of the land, and from the strange women (1 Esdras 9:9).

Your book of Ezra tells the same story, and its last verse is unclear about what happened to the children (Ezra 10:44). This book is not unclear at all. All these had taken strange wives, and they put them away with their children (1 Esdras 9:36).

Women and children, sent out of their homes for being of the wrong people.

I understand why Ezra feared it. His people were small, poor and surrounded, and he thought they would vanish into the peoples around them. But I cannot put this beside what I taught and call it close. My own line, as Matthew tells it, runs through Ruth, a Moabite woman who said to her Israelite mother-in-law, your people will be my people, and your God my God (Ruth 1:16; Matthew 1:5). In the story I told about the judgment of the nations, the King says, I was a stranger, and you took me in (Matthew 25:35).

The stranger counts. Her children count.

The day is holy

The book closes better than that, with Ezra reading the law to the people from a wooden platform, from morning until noon, before both men and women (1 Esdras 9:41). The people weep when they hear it. And the leaders tell them to stop weeping:

This day is holy to the Lord … go then, and eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions to those who have nothing (1 Esdras 9:50–51).

That is the right ending. The law is heard, and the first thing it produces is a feast, and the second is food carried to the people who have none.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 1 Esdras 3:10–12, then read chapter 4 straight through. Each speech is short.

You will find: wine, the king, women and truth, each argued for in turn, and the line With her there is no accepting of persons or rewards (1 Esdras 4:39).

Then read Ezra 10:44 beside 1 Esdras 9:36. See what each says about the children.

The Short Version

• 1 Esdras retells the end of 2 Chronicles, Ezra and part of Nehemiah in Greek, and adds one story found nowhere else.
• In it, three bodyguards argue whether wine, the king or women is strongest. The winner says truth is stronger than all of them.
• Great is truth, the people shout, and its Latin form, Magna est veritas, became a famous saying.
• The book ends with men sending away foreign wives and their children, which is far from what I taught about the stranger.
• Its last scene is the law read aloud, and a feast with portions sent to those who have nothing.