The ''Revelation of Ezra'' (''Revelatio Esdrae'') is a short

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

'' kalandologion'', a type of

almanac An almanac (also spelled almanack and almanach) is a regularly published listing of a set of current information about one or multiple subjects. It includes information like weather forecasting, weather forecasts, farmers' sowing, planting dates ...

that gives meteorological, agricultural, economic and other predictions for any given year based on the day of the week on which it begins. It treats the

kalends The calends or kalends () is the first day of every month in the Roman calendar. The English word "calendar" is derived from this word. Use The Romans called the first day of every month the ''calends'', signifying the start of a new lunar pha ...

(first day) of January as the beginning of the year. The ''Revelation'' was composed in Latin by an anonymous author in Western Europe or North Africa no later than the ninth century and possibly much earlier. It is preserved in three manuscripts of the ninth, twelfth and fifteenth centuries. It consists of an introductory sentence followed by seven paragraphs corresponding to the days of the week. It purports to be a "revelation which was made to

Ezra Ezra ( fl. fifth or fourth century BCE) is the main character of the Book of Ezra. According to the Hebrew Bible, he was an important Jewish scribe (''sofer'') and priest (''kohen'') in the early Second Temple period. In the Greek Septuagint, t ...

and the children of Israel". The use of the phrase "

Lord's Day In Christianity, the Lord's Day refers to Sunday, the traditional day of communal worship. It is the first day of the week in the Hebrew calendar and traditional Christian calendars. It is observed by most Christians as the weekly memorial of the ...

" marks its real author as at least a nominal Christian, but there is no attempt in the text to provide a theological justification for its fatalism. David Fiensy sees the pseudonym "Ezra" as chosen because of the popularity of ''

4 Ezra 2 Esdras, also called 4 Esdras, Latin Esdras, or Latin Ezra, is an apocalyptic book in some English versions of the Bible. Tradition ascribes it to Ezra, a scribe and priest of the fifth century BC, whom the book identifies with the sixth-ce ...

'', but Jens Schröter places the ''Revelation'' in "an independent line of reception of the figure of Ezra with no relationship to the prophetic and apocalyptic writings" like ''4 Ezra''. The text does bear resemblance to the Jewish '' Treatise of Shem'', which makes predictions for a year based on the sign of the zodiac at the start of the year. At a further remove is the

Dead Sea scroll The Dead Sea Scrolls, also called the Qumran Caves Scrolls, are a set of ancient Jewish manuscripts from the Second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE). They were discovered over a period of ten years, between 1946 and 1956, at the Qumran Cav ...

4QCryptic, which predicts a person's physical characteristics from the zodiac at his birth. Other ''kalandologia'' identical in structure to the ''Revelation'' survive in both Latin and

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

. The Latin text was published by

Giovanni Mercati Giovanni Mercati (17 December 1866 – 23 August 1957) was an Italian cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as archivist of the Vatican Secret Archives and librarian of the Vatican Library from 1936 until his death, and was elevat ...

in 1901 on the basis of all three manuscripts. Fiensy has made an English translation based on the oldest manuscript.At

Notes

Bibliography

* * * * * {{refend Old Testament pseudepigrapha Texts attributed to Ezra