Texts in Conversation
In 4 Ezra, God appears to Ezra from a fiery bush, echoing the scene with Moses in Exodus. This parallel portrays Ezra as a second Moses, not through lawgiving, but through the restoration of lost scriptures after the temple’s destruction.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Exodus 3:2
Hebrew Bible
2 The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from within a bush. He looked, and the bush was ablaze with fire, but it was not being consumed! 3 So Moses thought, “I will turn aside to see this amazing sight. Why does the bush not burn up?” 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him from within the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.”
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
4 Ezra 14:2
2 Esdras
Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses
1 It came to pass upon the third day, I sat under an oak, and, behold, a voice came out of a bush near me, and said, “Ezra, Ezra!” 2 I said, “Here I am, Lord,” and I stood up on my feet. 3 Then he said to me, “I revealed myself in a bush and talked with Moses when my people were in bondage in Egypt. 4 I sent him, and he led my people out of Egypt. I brought him up to Mount Sinai, where I kept him with me for many days.
Date: 70–132 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... it is fascinating that there actually was an ancient tradition about Ezra and the Torah of Moses. The tradition says that the original scroll of the Torah (and other books of the Bible) was burned up in the fire that destroyed the Temple in 587 B.C. but that Ezra was able to restore it by a revelation. This tradition is preserved in a work called the Fourth Book of Ezra. This book is not part of the Bible. It is rather part of the collection known as the Pseudepigrapha, which are works written by Christians and Jews between 200 B.C. and 200 A. D. The Fourth Book of Ezra comes from around 100 A. D. In it, God speaks to Ezra from a bush ... Ezra then recites the lost texts for forty days. Not to overstate the importance of this relatively late text, the point of this is simply that already in early times Ezra was associated with the production of the sacred text ..."
Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 224–225.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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