2 Baruch (The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch)

The biblical Baruch son of Neriah is a secondary figure. He writes Jeremiah's words on a scroll at the prophet's dictation and reads them in the Temple; he buys and witnesses a deed at Anathoth; when the scroll is burned he writes it again; and he goes down into Egypt with Jeremiah. He is a scribe, and the words are someone else's.

This book promotes him. Jeremiah is sent away to Babylon with the captives, and Baruch is told to remain in the ruins — so that the revelations come to him, and he becomes the prophet and teacher of those left behind. He laments, argues, receives visions, instructs the people, and finally writes to the exiles.

That promotion is doing work. A book about how faith survives the loss of the Temple needs a figure who stayed, and who is remembered above all for writing things down when the words were in danger of being lost. Baruch is exactly the right choice for a work whose answer to catastrophe is that the Torah remains.

Two cautions on naming. This is not the canonical Book of Baruch, which is a different work read in the Orthodox Old Testament. And it is not 3 Baruch, the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, nor 4 Baruch — separate books in the same loose family.

The narrative is set at the Babylonian destruction of Solomon's Temple in the sixth century BC. The book was written after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70, most likely late in the first century or early in the second.

The double setting is deliberate and it is the same device 4 Ezra uses. Placing contemporary anguish in the mouth of an ancient figure lets an author ask forbidden questions at a safe distance — and, more importantly, sets the present catastrophe alongside one that was followed by restoration. Readers who knew that the exiles came back from Babylon would hear the implication.

The crisis is theological before it is political. If Israel is chosen and the covenant holds, the ruin of the city and the sanctuary is not merely a defeat but a contradiction. The book faces it directly: Israel sinned, but the nations that destroyed her sin worse and prosper; the righteous suffer and the wicked flourish; and where, in all of that, is the justice of God?

Its answer is not the same as 4 Ezra's, and the difference is the reason for reading them together. 2 Baruch is markedly more confident. The Torah remains when the Temple has gone; obedience is still possible; the loss is real and it is not final. Where 4 Ezra leaves its protest standing, 2 Baruch consoles.

The complete apocalypse survives in one manuscript: the Syriac codex in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, published in the nineteenth century by Antonio Maria Ceriani. Readers of this section will recognise both the library and the scholar — the same Ambrosiana holds the Latin palimpsest of the Assumption of Moses, and Ceriani published that too. A remarkable amount of this literature reached the modern world through one man and one Milanese collection.

Beyond that manuscript the witnesses are fragmentary: Greek fragments recovered from papyrus, small Latin evidence, an Arabic version, and — importantly — the Letter of chapters 78 to 87, which circulated separately and survives in many more Syriac manuscripts and in lectionaries.

That last point matters for how the book was actually used. The apocalypse hung by a thread; the Letter was copied widely and read in church. Anything said about the transmission of 2 Baruch should distinguish the two.

As to the original language: the Syriac manuscript itself states that it was translated from Greek, and many scholars hold that the Greek in turn rendered a Hebrew or Aramaic composition. The evidence for the Semitic stage is internal rather than documentary, and the question remains open. The safe formulation is a probable Hebrew or Aramaic original, through Greek, into Syriac — with only the last of those three actually in hand.

The angel who interprets for Baruch is named Ramiel, or Ramael in some renderings, and the text describes him as the angel who presides over true visions.

The title is worth pausing on. It implies a distinction the ancient world took seriously — that not every vision is trustworthy, and that reliable revelation is mediated by a particular heavenly authority. Ramiel's presence is a guarantee of the vision's truth, not merely a convenience for explaining it.

His office is otherwise the standard one of the interpreting angel: the angelus interpres of Daniel, of Zechariah, of Enoch's guides, of the angel who shows John what must come to pass. He explains the cedar and the vine, and above all the cloud of black and bright waters, which he unfolds as the whole of sacred history.

He appears in the interpretation of history in a second role. 2 Baruch attributes to Ramiel the destruction of Sennacherib's army — the event that 2 Kings 19.35 and Isaiah 37.36 ascribe to the angel of the Lord, who went out and struck the camp of the Assyrians. The book supplies a name where Scripture gives none. That is a real datum about this literature's habits, and it is not a warrant for identifying Ramiel with the Angel of the Lord.

On his title: the text calls him an angel. It does not call him an archangel, and later usage should not be read back into it.

The name raises a question this catalogue has to answer carefully, because it already holds a record that looks like a match.

Ramiel here, Remiel in 1 Enoch 20, and Jeremiel in 4 Ezra are plainly related forms — and this database's Archangel Jeremiel carries Jeremiel, Jerahmeel and Jeremeel among his alternate names and cites 4 Ezra as his extra-biblical source. The connection is natural and this page links to that record.

It links with a qualification, and the qualification is the point. These are probably related names, not demonstrably one figure. Each text gives its bearer a different function: Remiel in 1 Enoch is set over those who rise; Jeremiel in 4 Ezra answers a question about the souls of the righteous; Ramiel here presides over true visions and interprets history. Collapsing them into a single being on the strength of a shared consonantal root is exactly the move this section exists to resist.

And as with Uriel, the standing of Jeremiel in Orthodox tradition rests on the Church's own liturgical tradition — the record's canonical status is Traditional and its primary source Liturgical Tradition — not on an appearance in a Jewish apocalypse. Traditions from 1 Enoch should not be imported into this book, which gives its angel a different office.

The scene in chapters 6 to 8 is the most theologically pointed thing in the book, and among the most striking in this literature.

Baruch is lifted above the walls and sees an angel descend into the Holy of Holies and take out the veil, the holy ark, the mercy seat, the two tables, the priestly vestments, the altar of incense and the rest of the vessels of the sanctuary — and the earth opens its mouth and swallows them, to keep them until the last times, when Jerusalem shall be restored.

Then angels are commanded to overthrow the walls and cast them down, so that the enemy may not boast and say that they overthrew the wall of Zion. Only afterwards do the Chaldeans enter and take a city already broken.

The move is deliberate and it answers the book's own central question. If Babylon — or Rome — destroyed the city, then the gods of the nations are stronger than the God of Israel. If God's own angels threw down the walls, then the destruction is judgment, the covenant holds, and the sanctuary's holy things were never captured at all.

Scripture ascribes the destruction to Babylon as God's instrument, in Kings, Jeremiah, Lamentations and Ezekiel. This book takes that instrumentality further than any canonical text, and the hidden vessels are its own contribution — a tradition with a long life afterwards, and one that should not be read back into Scripture.

2 Baruch's treatment of Adam is its best-known theological contribution, and the sharpest point of contrast with 4 Ezra.

It grants the premise: Adam sinned, and death came upon all. But it refuses the conclusion. Adam is not the cause except for his own soul, the book says — each of us has become his own Adam. What Adam brought was mortality and the conditions of the present age; what each person does with them is his own.

That is a genuinely different emphasis from 4 Ezra, which dwells on the evil heart sown in Adam and grown in all his descendants, and cries out that the fall was not his alone but ours also who are his descendants. Two Jewish authors of the same generation, reading the same chapters of Genesis, reach different balances between inherited condition and personal responsibility.

The comparison with Paul is unavoidable and must be handled with the same care. Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 work the same Genesis material, and the parallels reflect a shared Jewish inheritance rather than borrowing in any direction. And neither 2 Baruch nor 4 Ezra should be read through the later Western debates over original sin: this book is not an early witness for a position in a controversy it never heard of, and calling it proto-Pelagian or proto-Augustinian misdescribes it.

Chapters 49 to 51 contain the fullest and most carefully argued account of bodily resurrection to survive from ancient Judaism, and it is the reason this book matters most for a catalogue of the heavenly hosts.

Baruch asks the practical question: in what shape will those who live in the resurrection live? The answer proceeds in two stages, and the order is the whole argument.

First, the earth restores the dead exactly as it received them, unchanged — the same bodies, so that they may be recognised. The reason given is explicit: that the living may know that the dead are alive again, and that those who departed have returned. Identity has to be established before glory can be given, or the resurrection would be a replacement rather than a raising.

Only after recognition comes transformation. Then the appearance of those who are condemned shall be made worse, and the glory of the righteous shall be changed into the splendour of angels — they shall be made like the stars, and shall be able to behold the world now invisible to them, and time shall no longer age them.

The scriptural relatives are exact. The wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament and as the stars for ever in Daniel 12.3; in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are as the angels of God, in Matthew 22.30; they are equal unto the angels and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection, in Luke 20.36; and Paul's whole argument in 1 Corinthians 15 about the body that is sown and the body that is raised.

One thing must be said precisely, because it is easy to get wrong. Being made like the angels is not becoming an angel. The text describes a transformation of human beings into a glory comparable to the angels' — likeness of splendour, not change of nature. The resurrection is of the same persons, which is the very point the first stage of the argument establishes. And the resonance with what Orthodox theology calls glorification and incorruption is real and is a resonance: the doctrine is drawn from Scripture and the Fathers, not from this book.

2 Baruch 29 describes the age the Messiah inaugurates, and its central image is a meal.

Behemoth shall be revealed from his place and Leviathan shall ascend from the sea — the two great monsters created on the fifth day and kept until that time — and they shall be food for all who are left. The earth will yield ten thousandfold; a single vine will have a thousand branches, each branch a thousand clusters, each cluster a thousand grapes, each grape a cor of wine. The manna will come down again.

The two creatures are biblical. Behemoth and Leviathan are described at length in Job 40 and 41; Psalm 74 has God breaking the heads of Leviathan and giving him as food; Isaiah 27 has the Lord punishing Leviathan the fleeing serpent with His great and strong sword. Behind them stands the older Near Eastern imagery of the chaos monster subdued at creation.

That is why the meal is not merely a feast. To serve the chaos monsters as food is to say that the powers which threatened creation from the beginning are finally and comprehensively defeated — so thoroughly that they end up on the table. The imagery is close to Isaiah 25, where the Lord makes a feast for all peoples on the mountain and swallows up death for ever.

Fr Stephen De Young and Fr Andrew Damick discuss this verse in The Lord of Spirits as part of a wider biblical and Second Temple tradition of the eschatological defeat of chaos and of tyrannical powers — reading Leviathan and Behemoth as spiritual and cosmic forces rather than as zoology. That is a theological interpretation of the imagery, offered as such, and it should be distinguished both from the text's own narrative picture and from any claim about what its author intended. Nor should it collapse into calling them demons: this catalogue classifies them as chaos creatures rather than as angels or demons, which is what the imagery actually supports.

Two great visions carry the book's philosophy of history.

In the first, Baruch sees a forest in a plain, surrounded by high mountains, and a vine, and under the vine a peaceful fountain. The fountain becomes a torrent that uproots the forest and levels the mountains, until only one cedar is left; and the cedar is cast down before the vine, and reproached, and burned. The interpretation makes the forest the kingdoms that shall be destroyed, the last cedar their final ruler, and the vine the Messiah who convicts and destroys him.

In the second and longer vision a great cloud rises from the sea and pours out over the earth, in alternating black and bright waters, twelve times over, ending with waters blacker than all that went before and then with lightning. Ramiel interprets it as the whole course of the world from Adam onward: the black waters are the ages of transgression — Adam's sin, the generation of the flood, Egypt, the wicked kings, the destruction of Zion — and the bright are the ages of righteousness — Abraham and the patriarchs, Moses and the Law, David and Solomon, Hezekiah, Josiah. The last black waters are the tribulation at the end, and the lightning that follows is the Messiah.

This is an entire theology of history compressed into a weather system: no age is uniform, good and evil alternate, and the pattern is neither random nor endless. Whether each water answers to exactly the figure a given commentator assigns is a question for the primary text, and identifications should be checked rather than taken from summaries — including this one.

When Baruch grieves that Zion has been given over, the answer he receives is that the city which was delivered up was not the city God had in view. The Jerusalem that matters was prepared beforehand, shown to Adam before he sinned, shown to Abraham in the night between the divided pieces, and shown to Moses on Sinai together with the pattern of the tabernacle — and it is preserved with God, along with Paradise.

The relatives are genuinely scriptural: the pattern shown to Moses in the mount in Exodus 25, the Jerusalem above in Galatians 4, the heavenly sanctuary of Hebrews, and the holy city coming down out of heaven in Revelation 21. These are not identical conceptions and should not be merged, but they belong to one family of thought, and this book is a valuable early witness to it.

As for Baruch himself, he is told that he will be taken up from the earth and preserved until the consummation of the times, so that he may testify. The wording is careful and this page keeps it careful: the text speaks of preservation and removal rather than plainly narrating a bodily assumption, and it should not be paraphrased into one. The comparison with Enoch and Elijah suggests itself and the traditions are not identical.

The apocalypse closes and the Letter begins — chapters 78 to 87, addressed to the nine and a half tribes in exile, urging them to hold to the Law, since Zion is taken from us and we have nothing now save the Mighty One and His Law. Baruch sends it by an eagle. The bird is a marvel of the narrative rather than a heavenly being, and it should not be catalogued as one.

It is not. 2 Baruch is not part of the Eastern Orthodox biblical canon, appears in no Orthodox canon list, and was received by no council. Where it survives, it survives through Syriac Christian scribes.

That distinction has to be kept sharp, and this section of the site keeps it sharp in the same way for the Testament of Adam. Syriac Orthodox, the Church of the East and the other Syriac Christian traditions are not the Eastern Orthodox Church. Preservation in a Syriac manuscript — even one bound with biblical material, even one used liturgically — is evidence about Syriac Christianity, not about Byzantine reception.

Within Syriac Christianity the two halves of the book fared very differently. The apocalypse survives complete in a single codex. The Letter was copied widely, appears in numerous manuscripts and lectionaries, and was read — so the part of 2 Baruch with a genuine history of Christian ecclesiastical use is its last ten chapters, not its visions.

Early Christian citation of the apocalypse is not securely established, and this page claims none. Thematic parallels with Syriac Fathers, with Paul on resurrection, and with Revelation on Rome and the New Jerusalem are real and are best classified as shared Jewish apocalyptic inheritance rather than dependence in any direction. No Orthodox liturgical text or icon is known to depend on it.

Among modern Orthodox writers the reference point located here is the Lord of Spirits treatment of 29.4 on Leviathan and Behemoth. Citing a verse as Second Temple evidence is not a recommendation of the whole book, and this page does not present it as one.

A sourcing note, as on the other pages in this section written from research briefs. The book's date and setting, its relationship to 4 Ezra, the single-manuscript survival, Ramiel's role and title, the resurrection discourse, the Adam saying, the Leviathan passage and the Syriac distinction are reliable. Chapter and verse references, the identifications in the cloud vision, the details of the fragmentary witnesses and bibliographic particulars have not been checked against the critical editions, and should be verified before this profile is promoted.

It can illuminate the Jewish response to AD 70 and how faith survived the Temple's loss; the conviction that the Torah remains when the sanctuary is gone; angelic mediation of revelation and the office of the interpreting angel; the Ramiel traditions; the most detailed ancient Jewish argument for bodily resurrection; the transformation of the righteous into the splendour of angels; Adam and the balance of inherited condition against personal responsibility; Jewish messianism; the chaos monsters and their eschatological defeat; the heavenly Jerusalem; and the conceptual background of early Christianity.

It cannot establish binding Orthodox doctrine; a map of the afterlife; Ramiel's official standing; the identity of Ramiel with Remiel, Jeremiel or Uriel; an Orthodox doctrine of ancestral sin; a chronology of the end; the literal nature of Leviathan and Behemoth; the toll houses; influence on Paul or Revelation; or Eastern Orthodox canonical status on the strength of Syriac preservation.