Written after the world ended. 2 Esdras is the only Apocrypha book composed after the time of Jesus — likely around AD 100, by a Jewish author wrestling with Rome's destruction of Jerusalem's temple thirty years earlier. Seven visions: an eagle that is Rome, a man rising from the sea, a mourning woman revealed as Zion, and endless questions — why Israel suffers, when the age will end, what happens to the wicked. Its raw honesty is still quoted wherever people grieve without answers. In older English Bibles this apocalypse stood at the end of the Apocrypha; modern scholars call it 4 Ezra.

This book is also available in the Revised Version (1895) — modern spelling.