13 passagesSecond Temple and late antique periodHebrew / Aramaic / GreekPublic Domain
Individual passages from 2 Baruch, indexed for close reading, source verification, and myth source-checking.
The city was already dead. It just hadn't fallen yet. In the twenty-fifth year of King Jeconiah's reign over Judah, the word of God came to Baruch son of Neriah, the faithful scrib...
The Chaldean army surrounded Jerusalem. But the real destruction, the kind that shatters heaven, had already begun inside the walls. On the evening before the siege tightened, Baru...
Two men stood in the ashes of the world. Baruch and Jeremiah, the scribe and the prophet, whose hearts had been found pure from sin, who had not been captured when the city fell. T...
Baruch stood on Mount Zion. The ruins smoked beneath him. And then a voice fell from the height of heaven like a stone. "Stand on your feet, Baruch, and hear the word of the mighty...
Seven days without bread. Seven days without water. Seven days without speaking a single word to another human being. Baruch sat in a cave in the Valley of Kidron, sanctifying his ...
Twelve catastrophes. Stacked on top of each other. Each one worse than the last. This is what God revealed to Baruch about the end of the world. And it reads like a countdown to an...
Baruch went to the holy place, the place where the Temple once stood. And sat down on the ruins. The ground where the high priest had once offered sacrifices and placed fragrant in...
What happens to the body after death? Not the soul, the body. Will the dead come back as they were? Will they be transformed into something else entirely? Baruch asked God the ques...
A cloud rose from a vast sea. Baruch watched it ascend, enormous, churning, filled with waters both black and bright, shot through with colors, and crowned at its summit by a bolt ...
The cloud itself was the duration of the entire world, created when God took counsel to make it. The first black waters were the transgression of Adam, the moment that untimely dea...
This vision comes from 2 Baruch, a work written in the shadow of the destruction of the Second Temple and placed in the mouth of Baruch, the scribe of Jeremiah, who had also witnes...
The lightning that crowned the cloud in Baruch's vision was not only an instrument of judgment. In 2 Baruch, the apocalypse written in the wake of the Temple's destruction to conso...
This is the letter that Baruch son of Neriah sent across the river Euphrates to the nine and a half tribes in exile. It may be the most hopeful document ever written from the rubbl...
