Question 2: Whether the prophetic books were consumed in the burning of Jerusalem and were restored by Ezra.
Question 2: Whether the prophetic books were consumed in the burning of Jerusalem and were restored by Ezra.
§ 111. (II) The question arises: Were all the Books of Moses and the prophets consumed in the burning of the temple and the city of Jerusalem, which the Chaldeans once caused, and were they later restored by Ezra through a miracle? This is affirmed by: (1) Some of the ancients. Basil, Epist. ad Chilonem: “Here is the field where Ezra had his success and uttered all the divine books by God’s mandate.” Suidas: “Ezra described the books that they wanted, as he drew them from his memory.” Irenaeus appears to lean toward the same opinion in Adv. haeres., bk. 3, c. 25, where he writes:
In the captivity of the people that occurred under Nebuchadnezzar, when Scripture was corrupted; and seventy years later, when the people were going down into their own region; and again later, in the time of Artaxerxes, king of the Persians, God inspired Ezra, a priest of the tribe of Levi, to recount all the sermons of the prophets and to restore to the people that Law which had been given through Moses.
These, too, have this opinion: Tertullian (De habitu muliebr.), Clement of Alexandria (Stromat., bk. 1), and Eusebius (Chronic.) (2) Some of the Papists: Pistorius (Contra D. Mentzeri, disp. 1), Sixtus Senensis (Biblioth., bk. 1, under the title “Ezdrae libri duo”), and others.
This opinion rests especially upon three foundations: (1) On the witness of Ezra himself, where he recalls that “for forty full days Ezra, breathed on by the divine Spirit, recited to five men who were taking down swiftly what he was saying. In this way the entire Scripture that had been completely lost was restored” (bk. 4, c. 14). (2) On the report of Neh. 8:1: “They told Ezra the scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses, and Ezra brought it.” (3) On Ezra’s title, because he is called 
, “scribe.”
§ 112. We repudiate that opinion and against it we press the argument of: (1) Divine providence, which has never allowed nor does allow the canonical books, which were written as a deposit for the preservation of the Word and for the instruction of the Church of all times, ever to be destroyed (Isa. 40:[8]; Luke 21:33; 1 Pet. 1:25).
(2) The supply of copies of the Bible. Among the people of Israel there were several thousand codices of the Bible, the zealous daily reading of which was demanded of each (Deut. 6:7; 17:18; etc.). Will anyone allow himself to be persuaded that all these, along with the autographs that were being kept beside the ark of the covenant, were burned in the fire? By the ordinance of God [Dei ordinatione] the priests had been established as interpreters and guardians of the divine Law. But now, several thousand of them could be counted in the people of Israel. David established seventeen hundred Levites to teach the people on this side of the Jordan and twenty-seven hundred to carry out the teaching office across the Jordan. How could these teach without a codex of the Bible? Therefore even if those copies of the sacred books that were being kept beside the ark had been burned in the fire (which, nevertheless, no apparent reason compels us to concede), still it is clearly not likely that some copies did not continue to exist among the priests, especially the prophets Ezekiel, Daniel, Jeremiah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Ezra himself, who lived around the beginning of and during the Babylonian captivity. Some add from 2 Maccabees 2 that Jeremiah took “the ark of the covenant, the altar of incense, and the tabernacle” out of the Chaldeans’ burning of the city and temple. Therefore he undoubtedly preserved the sacred books with greater care. That book, however, is apocryphal, a narrative full of fables, as we shall show later in its own place. Consequently, we do not use this argument at all.
(3) Clear Scripture. Nearly seventy years after the Chaldeans burned the city and temple and more than eighty years before Ezra, the prophet Daniel (9:2, 11) mentions the Books of Moses and Jeremiah as if they were still safe and unharmed.
(4) Historical truth. The annals of the Jews bear witness that in the actual Babylonian captivity the Jews had their own synagogues in which they would read aloud Moses and the prophets (Acts 15:21). They also had two famous schools, one of which was 
, the school of Syria, the other 
. Each of these had its own director of the academy (see Buxtorf, Thesaur., p. 603; Fabricius, Partit. Cod. Hebr., c. 2). Josephus even mentions that when the prophecy of Isaiah 45 was shown to him, King Cyrus was moved to grant the Jews freedom and the right to rebuild the temple. Josephus narrates that “in the triumphal march of Titus Vespasian, the tables of the laws of the Jews were brought as the last of the spoils” (De bell. Jud., bk. 7, c. 24). It is probable that these were the actual autographs written by the fingers of God and Moses because in his Vita, Josephus praises the fact that, as a great kindness, Vespasian granted those tables to them.
(5) Evident reason. If all the sacred books were not burned in the persecution of King Antiochus, it is much less likely that all those books could be burned by the Chaldeans. The logical sequence [of this statement] is proved because Antiochus acted diligently to have all the sacred books burned (1 Maccabees 1:59), but nowhere is it claimed that the Chaldeans were of the same mind. In fact, when a specific listing is made of what was destroyed in the Chaldeans’ fire (last book of 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles; Jer. 52:17), there is no mention of the sacred books among those things. The antecedent is proved from 1 Maccabees 3:[48] and from the evidence of the situation. You see, it would have to have been another Ezra who was given the responsibility of restoring the books that we have today. Furthermore, had Ezra dictated sacred books that had been totally destroyed, he would have done this in the Chaldaic language or certainly in the current vernacular of the Israelites, which was a mixture of Hebrew and Chaldaic idioms, whence some writings also in the Chaldaic idiom are found in Ezra and Daniel. But it is evident that the sacred books we have today were written in a pure Hebrew language, namely, the language that our first parents, the patriarchs, and the prophets used, which is clear even from an etymology of proper names. Adam said about his newly created wife: “She shall be called 
[“woman”] because she was taken from 
(or “from man”) (Gen. 2:23). In the Chaldaic language, however, the words “man” and “woman” do not have this similarity of words, for in it “man” is called 
and “woman” is 
In these words we do not find that kind of similarity. Some people also add this argument: If Ezra were the restorer of the Bible, we would not have the same books that Moses and the prophets wrote. However, the defenders of the other opinion could meet this argument by responding that Ezra did not compose completely new books but restored the first ones with the same words and sentences, that he was not the author of new books but the repairer and restorer of the original books.
(6) The agreement of the saner Papists. Bellarmine, De verbo Dei, bk. 2, c. 1: “To us the opinion seems improbable that Ezra restored the sacred books that had been burned in the fire of the Chaldeans, for it does not depend on any other foundation than the testimony of an apocryphal book, that is, 4 Ezra.” At the end of the chapter: “Because it is clear that the books of Ezra are full of Chaldaic words and that the books of the Law and the prophets were written in a pure Hebrew idiom, it ought also to appear clear that we have the books of the Law and the prophets written not by Ezra, but by Moses and the ancient prophets.” Pererius attacks the same idea with many arguments in the preface to his commentary on Genesis.
§ 113. The arguments on the other side have no strength. (1) Although Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Eusebius (in the passages we just cited), as well as Ambrose (De bono mortis, c. 10) and Chrysostom (homily 8 on Hebrews), all quote that fourth book under the name of Ezra and, in fact, even call it “divine” (from which the ancients developed a certain probability for this opinion), that fourth book nevertheless is actually apocryphal. This is because in several places and even in c. 14 it proposes Jewish fables and is repudiated by the saner Papists themselves, as we shall show in greater detail in its own place. Moreover, in this passage Ezra seems to be discussing not a restoration of divine and canonical books but the writing of other books, which had a mystic and inner intelligence of the sacred books, which intelligence they call Cabala. You see, it is said that in forty days Ezra wrote 204 books, 134 of which he gave to the people, but 70 of which a mandate of God forbade him to bring out in public.
(2) The passage of Nehemiah (c. 8) is far from confirming the opinion about the restoration of the Law. In fact, it rather opposes it, for they did not say to Ezra that he should write new books but that he should bring out those that they knew were still extant. What v. 9 has is emphatic: “And they found it written in the Law.” So it still stands that it was writing [scriptura] of the Law that they found and that they read.
(3) The sense in which Ezra is called a “scribe” will appear from the following. Otherwise, in general, he who is skilled in the divine Law and is an interpreter or teacher of it is called a 
, “a sacred scribe.”