Apocalypse of Sedrach

Introduction

There are books that history chooses to remember, and there are books that history buries — not out of malice, but out of the slow, grinding indifference of time. Councils convene, canons are established, boundaries are drawn around what is sacred and what is merely curious, and in the process, entire libraries of spiritual thought are pushed to the margins of civilization. Some of these lost or suppressed texts eventually resurface, blinking in the light of modern scholarship, carrying with them questions so raw and so urgent that they feel less like ancient documents and more like letters written directly to our present moment. The text you are about to read is one of those extraordinary survivals — a short, astonishing, deeply human dialogue between a man and his God, preserved against all probability, and still capable of stopping a careful reader cold in their tracks.

The work belongs to a category of ancient Jewish and early Christian literature known broadly as apocalyptic writing — a genre far richer and stranger than the word 'apocalypse' suggests to modern ears. Today, we tend to use that word as a synonym for catastrophe, for the end of the world rendered in fire and collapse. But in its original Greek sense, apokalypsis simply means an unveiling, a drawing back of the curtain to reveal what is ordinarily hidden from human sight. Apocalyptic literature was not primarily about destruction; it was about disclosure. It was the literature of visionaries, mystics, and troubled souls who believed that the deepest truths about human existence — about suffering, justice, divine love, and the fate of the soul after death — were not accessible through ordinary reasoning or daily experience, but required a special kind of revelation, a guided journey through realms beyond the visible world.

Within this broad tradition, the text at hand occupies a singular and somewhat puzzling position. It is neither as famous as the canonical Book of Revelation nor as widely studied as the Ethiopian Book of Enoch or the Apocalypse of Paul. For centuries it existed in the shadows of scholarship, known only to a handful of specialists in late antique religious literature. Yet those who have encountered it closely have often remarked on its peculiar power — the way it manages, in a surprisingly compact space, to raise questions that have occupied philosophers, theologians, and ordinary grieving human beings across every culture and every era. Questions about why a good God permits suffering. Questions about whether divine mercy can ultimately outweigh divine justice. Questions about what it means to love something you have made, and what obligations that love creates.

At the center of the text stands a figure named Sedrach, whose name itself carries echoes of the broader Semitic literary tradition and who functions in the narrative as a kind of everyman-mystic — a human soul bold enough, or desperate enough, to press God directly on the hardest questions imaginable. Sedrach is not a warrior, not a king, not a prophet in the conventional sense. He is something rarer in ancient religious literature: a questioner. And the questions he brings before God are not polite theological inquiries posed from a safe academic distance. They are the questions of someone who has looked at the world honestly, seen its suffering, contemplated the brevity and fragility of human life, and refused to simply accept comfortable answers. In this sense, Sedrach feels startlingly contemporary — a figure who would not be out of place in a modern hospital waiting room, or sitting at the bedside of someone dying too young, or staring at the ceiling at three in the morning wrestling with doubts that daylight makes it easier to suppress.

The text opens with a visionary scenario that draws on well-established conventions of the apocalyptic genre: Sedrach is caught up into the heavens, transported beyond the ordinary boundaries of human experience, and brought into direct conversation with God. This heavenly ascent is a motif with deep roots in Jewish mystical tradition, appearing in various forms across a wide range of texts from roughly the second century BCE through the early centuries of the common era. In many of these texts, the ascent functions primarily as a vehicle for cosmic revelation — the seer is shown the architecture of the heavens, the secrets of the stars, the hidden mechanisms of divine judgment. But in this particular work, the cosmic scenery is almost beside the point. What matters is the conversation itself, and the extraordinary emotional texture of that conversation.

Because what Sedrach does, once he finds himself in the presence of the divine, is argue. He does not simply receive revelation passively; he pushes back. He challenges. He mourns. He expresses something that reads unmistakably like grief — grief for humanity, grief for the suffering that seems baked into the very structure of human existence, grief for the apparent gap between the world as it is and the world as a loving creator might have made it. And God, in this text, does not respond with thunderous authority or with the kind of overwhelming divine presence that reduces the questioner to silence, as happens in the Book of Job's famous whirlwind speech. Instead, the divine voice in this dialogue is patient, explanatory, and — most strikingly of all — genuinely tender. The God of this text is a God who seems to understand why the questions are being asked, and who takes them seriously enough to engage with them at length.

This quality of mutual engagement, of genuine dialogue rather than mere transmission, is one of the features that makes the work so unusual and so valuable. Ancient religious literature is full of divine pronouncements, divine commands, divine judgments. It is far less full of divine conversations in the true sense — exchanges in which both parties are genuinely present to each other, in which the human interlocutor's pain and confusion are acknowledged rather than simply overridden. The intimacy of the exchange in this text has led some scholars to compare it to certain passages in the Psalms, where the speaker addresses God with a directness that borders on accusation, or to the mystical dialogues of later Jewish and Christian traditions in which the soul's relationship with the divine is understood in terms of love — passionate, complicated, sometimes anguished love — rather than mere obedience.

The question of the text's origins is one that scholars have debated for well over a century, and it remains genuinely open in ways that make it all the more fascinating. The work survives in Greek manuscripts, and the language of those manuscripts places its final written form somewhere in the early medieval period. But the ideas it contains, the theological concerns it wrestles with, and the literary conventions it employs all point toward a much older substrate — toward a text, or a tradition of texts, that likely originated in the late antique world, possibly as early as the second or third century of the common era, in the complex cultural space where Jewish, Christian, and broader Hellenistic religious thought intersected and cross-pollinated in ways that later, more rigid orthodoxies would work hard to suppress or forget.

A Text Between Worlds

To understand why a text like this one was preserved at all — and equally, why it was never quite absorbed into the mainstream of either Jewish or Christian tradition — it helps to spend a moment thinking about the world in which it was born. The centuries immediately surrounding the beginning of the common era were a period of extraordinary religious ferment in the Mediterranean world and the Near East. The old certainties of traditional religion were under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously. Greek philosophical thought had introduced new ways of thinking about the divine — more abstract, more concerned with reason and cosmic order, less comfortable with the anthropomorphic deities of traditional mythology. Political catastrophe, most dramatically the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, had shattered existing frameworks of Jewish religious identity and forced a profound rethinking of the relationship between God, history, and the chosen people. And out of this crucible of crisis and questioning, new religious movements were emerging with startling rapidity — movements that would eventually crystallize into what we now call Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, Gnosticism, and a dozen other traditions, but that in their earliest forms were far more fluid, far more experimental, and far more willing to entertain radical theological questions than their later, institutionalized successors.

Apocalyptic literature was, in many ways, the perfect literary form for this moment of uncertainty and searching. It allowed writers to explore the most dangerous theological questions — Why does God permit evil? What happens to the soul after death? Is divine justice truly just? — under the protective cover of visionary narrative. By framing their theological explorations as heavenly journeys and divine revelations, apocalyptic writers could say things that would have been impossible to say in more straightforward doctrinal form. The genre gave them a kind of creative and intellectual freedom that the increasingly institutionalized forms of both Jewish and Christian religious authority would eventually close off. And it gave their readers something equally precious: a framework for thinking about their own suffering and confusion that was neither the cold comfort of philosophical abstraction nor the sometimes brutal simplicity of divine command.

The text we are considering here seems to have emerged from this world of creative theological ferment, and it bears the marks of multiple influences in ways that have made it difficult to classify neatly as either Jewish or Christian in origin. There are elements that clearly reflect Jewish apocalyptic tradition — the heavenly ascent, certain features of the divine characterization, the deep concern with human mortality and the fate of the soul. There are also elements that suggest Christian influence or origin — specific theological formulations, certain narrative details that parallel early Christian apocryphal literature. And there are passages that seem to draw on a broader tradition of Mediterranean religious thought that cannot be reduced to either category.

This hybrid quality, which once led some scholars to dismiss the text as a confused or derivative compilation, is now increasingly recognized as one of its most interesting features. It is a document that lived at the intersection of traditions, that drew freely on multiple streams of religious thought, and that was preserved precisely because it addressed questions that no single tradition had managed to answer satisfactorily. The people who copied it and kept it alive across the centuries were not, in all likelihood, making careful theological distinctions about its precise doctrinal status. They were preserving it because it spoke to something real in their experience — because the questions Sedrach asks of God were their questions too, and because the answers, or partial answers, or honest acknowledgments of difficulty that the text offers, gave them something they needed.

It is worth pausing on the question of what kind of reader this text was written for, because the answer shapes everything about how it should be approached. This is not a text for specialists, though specialists have much to learn from it. It is not a text that requires extensive background in ancient languages or the technicalities of biblical scholarship, though that background can deepen one's appreciation of its nuances. It is, at its core, a text written for human beings who have suffered, or who love someone who has suffered, or who have looked at the world with clear eyes and found themselves unable to reconcile what they see with what they have been told about the nature of the divine. It is a text for people who have questions they are almost afraid to ask, because the questions feel too big, or too presumptuous, or too likely to lead somewhere frightening.

The remarkable thing about this ancient dialogue is that it does not punish those questions. It does not respond to human anguish with divine impatience or with the theological equivalent of 'because I said so.' It takes the questions seriously. It sits with them. And in doing so, it models something that is both spiritually profound and humanly necessary: the possibility of an honest relationship with the divine, a relationship in which the full weight of human experience — including doubt, grief, anger, and confusion — is not excluded from the conversation but brought directly into it.

Scholars who have worked closely with the manuscript tradition of this text have noted that it exists in several different versions, with variations that suggest a long history of copying, editing, and adaptation as it passed through different communities and different historical contexts. This is entirely typical of ancient religious literature; very few texts of this kind have come down to us in anything like a single, stable form. What is perhaps more unusual is the degree to which the core dialogue — the essential confrontation between the questioning human soul and the responding divine voice — remains consistent across the various versions. Whatever else changed as the text traveled through time, the heart of it remained intact: a person asking God the hardest questions, and God answering with unexpected gentleness.

The theological concerns of the text center on several interlocking themes that give it its remarkable coherence and depth. The nature of human free will and its relationship to divine foreknowledge is one of these central concerns — a question that has occupied religious thinkers from Augustine to Aquinas to the present day, and that the text approaches with a directness and honesty that more systematic theological treatments sometimes lack. The tension between divine justice and divine mercy is another — a tension that the text does not resolve by simply declaring one to be more important than the other, but instead holds open in a way that feels true to the actual complexity of the question. And underlying all of these concerns is the most fundamental question of all: what does it mean to be human, to be finite and mortal and capable of both great love and great cruelty, in a universe created by an infinite and loving God?

Why This Text Matters Now

There is a particular kind of relevance that ancient texts can achieve — not the relevance of direct historical parallel, where we look to the past for lessons that map neatly onto present circumstances, but a deeper relevance rooted in the unchanging features of human experience. Birth and death, love and loss, the desire for meaning in the face of suffering, the hunger for justice in a world that so often seems indifferent to it — these are not problems that any civilization has solved, and they are not problems that modernity has made obsolete. If anything, the particular forms of suffering and confusion that characterize our present moment — the sense of living in a world of overwhelming complexity, of being bombarded with information while starved for wisdom, of facing existential threats that seem to dwarf any individual human response — make the questions at the heart of this ancient dialogue feel more urgent, not less.

We live in an era that is, in some ways, deeply uncomfortable with the kind of direct, unmediated engagement with ultimate questions that this text models. We have developed sophisticated cultural mechanisms for managing existential anxiety — through distraction, through irony, through the comfortable numbness of constant stimulation. We have also, in many quarters, developed a kind of reflexive skepticism toward religious or spiritual frameworks that makes it difficult to engage seriously with texts like this one without immediately retreating into the safe distance of purely academic analysis. And yet the questions remain. They do not go away simply because we have found better ways of avoiding them. They surface in moments of crisis, in the quiet hours of the night, in the face of illness or loss or the sudden, vertiginous awareness of our own mortality.

What this ancient dialogue offers is not a system of answers — it would be a misreading of the text to approach it looking for a neat theological resolution to the problems it raises. What it offers instead is something rarer and more valuable: a model of honest engagement. It shows us a human being who refuses to pretend that everything is fine, who insists on bringing his full experience — his grief, his confusion, his anger at the apparent injustice of human existence — into his relationship with the divine. And it shows us a divine response that honors that honesty rather than punishing it. In a culture that often demands that religious faith take the form of cheerful certainty, there is something deeply liberating about a text that locates spiritual depth precisely in the willingness to ask the hard questions and to sit with the difficulty of the answers.

The scholarly recovery of texts like this one has been one of the quiet revolutions of modern religious studies — a gradual recognition that the canon of sacred literature, as established by the institutional churches and synagogues of late antiquity, represents only a fraction of the rich and diverse spiritual thought that was actually circulating in those formative centuries. The texts that were excluded from the canon were not, in most cases, excluded because they were theologically shallow or spiritually worthless. They were excluded for complex reasons that had as much to do with institutional politics, cultural anxieties, and the practical needs of emerging religious communities as with any purely theological assessment of their value. Recovering them does not require abandoning or devaluing the canonical texts; it means enriching our understanding of the full range of human spiritual experience that those canonical texts were drawn from and existed alongside.

For readers who come to this text from within a living religious tradition — whether Jewish, Christian, or any other — it offers the particular pleasure of encountering the deep roots of that tradition in their original complexity and openness, before the necessary but sometimes limiting work of systematization and canonization had been fully accomplished. For readers who come to it from outside any particular tradition, it offers something equally valuable: evidence that the questions they carry, the doubts and griefs and hungers that they may have been told have no place in 'proper' religious thought, are in fact ancient and honored questions, questions that serious spiritual thinkers have always recognized as lying at the very heart of the human condition.

Reading this text carefully and slowly — which is the only way it should be read — is an experience that tends to produce a distinctive combination of recognition and surprise. The recognition comes from encountering questions and concerns that feel utterly familiar, that could have been written yesterday. The surprise comes from discovering how the text handles those questions, from the unexpected emotional texture of the divine voice, from the moments of genuine tenderness and even humor that punctuate what might otherwise be a relentlessly solemn theological exercise. Ancient religious literature is often assumed to be uniformly grave and formal, but this text has moments of genuine warmth that cut through the solemnity and remind us that its authors were human beings, not just theological machines.

The translation and presentation you hold in your hands has been prepared with the intention of making this extraordinary document as accessible as possible to a general reader while respecting the complexity and depth of the original. The goal has been clarity without oversimplification, accessibility without condescension. Where the text is difficult — and there are passages that are genuinely difficult, where the manuscript tradition is uncertain or where the theological argument requires careful unpacking — the aim has been to illuminate rather than to smooth over, to invite the reader into the difficulty rather than to pretend it does not exist. Because the difficulty, in many cases, is precisely the point: this is a text that was written in full awareness of the fact that the questions it raises do not have easy answers, and any presentation that made it seem otherwise would be a betrayal of its essential spirit.

There is one more thing worth saying before you turn to the text itself, something about the experience of reading it that no amount of scholarly or contextual framing can fully prepare you for. At a certain point in the dialogue, there is a moment — readers will recognize it when they reach it — where the exchange between the human questioner and the divine respondent reaches a kind of emotional crescendo, where the accumulated weight of everything that has been said suddenly crystallizes into something that feels less like theology and more like pure human longing meeting pure divine love. It is one of those rare moments in ancient literature where the centuries between the text and the reader simply collapse, where the distance of history and culture and language becomes irrelevant, and what remains is something immediate and alive and true. That moment is worth every page that precedes it. It is, in a sense, what the whole text has been building toward — and it is something that, once encountered, is not easily forgotten.

So turn the page. Enter the dialogue. Bring your own questions with you, because this is a text that rewards exactly that kind of personal engagement. The figure of Sedrach, standing in the presence of the divine and refusing to be silenced, has been waiting a very long time for new readers — readers who understand, as he did, that the deepest form of faith is not the absence of questions but the courage to ask them.

Apocalypse of Sedrach

1. On Love

Beloved, let us prefer nothing in honor except sincere love, for in many things we stumble every day and night and hour. For this reason let us pursue love, since it covers a multitude of sins. What is the profit, my children, if we have all things and have not saving love? O blessed love, supplier of all good things! Blessed is the man who has gained true faith and sincere love, according as the Master said: there is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friend.

2. Sedrach Is Taken Up to Heaven

Invisibly he received a voice in his ears: Come here, Sedrach, since you wish and desire to converse with God and ask him to reveal to you whatever you wish to ask. And Sedrach said: What, Sir? And the voice said to him: I was sent to you to raise you up into heaven. And he said: I desired to speak mouth to mouth with God; I am not fit, Sir, to come into heaven. And stretching out his wings the angel took him up, and he came into heaven to the very flame, and he was set as high as the third heaven, and in it stood the flame of the divinity.

3. Sedrach Brings His Suit Before God

And the Lord said to him: Welcome, my beloved Sedrach. What suit do you have against God who created you, that you said, I desired to speak face to face with God? Sedrach said: Yes, truly, the son has a suit with the Father. My Lord, why did you make the earth? The Lord said to him: For man's sake. Sedrach said: And why did you make the sea? Why did you scatter every good thing on the earth? The Lord said to him: For man's sake. Sedrach said to him: If you did all these things, why will you destroy him? And the Lord said: Man is my work and the creature of my hands, and I discipline him as I find good.

4. The Fall of Adam

Sedrach said to him: Chastisement and fire are your discipline; they are bitter, my Lord. It would have been better for man if he had not been born. Why then did you make him, my Lord? Why did you weary your undefiled hands and create man, since you did not intend to have mercy on him? God said to him: I made Adam the first creature and placed him in Paradise in the midst of the tree of life and said to him: Eat of all the fruits, but beware of the tree of life, for if you eat of it you shall die the death. But he transgressed my commandment and, being deceived by the devil, ate of the tree.

5. Sedrach Pleads Against the Devil

Sedrach said to him: By your will Adam was deceived, my Lord. You commanded your angels to draw near to Adam, and the first of the angels himself transgressed your commandment and did not draw near to him, and you banished him because he transgressed your commandment and made no approach to the work of your hands. If you loved man, why did you not slay the devil, the worker of unrighteousness? Who is able to fight against an invisible spirit? He enters like smoke into the hearts of men and teaches them every sin. He fights against you, the immortal God, and what can wretched man do against him? Have mercy, O Lord, and stop the chastisements. But if not, count me also among the sinners. If you will have no mercy on the sinners, where are your mercies, where is your compassion, O Lord?

6. God Answers: The Parable of the Prodigal Son

God said to him: Be it known to you that I ordered all things to be favorable to him. I gave him understanding and made him the heir of heaven and earth, and I subjected all things to him, and every living thing flees from him and from before his face. But he, having received of mine, became alien, adulterous, and sinful. Tell me, what father, having given his son his portion, when the son takes his substance and leaves his father and goes away and becomes a stranger and serves a stranger — when the father sees that the son has deserted him, does not his heart grow dark, and does not the father go and take back his substance and banish him from his glory because he deserted his father? And how much more have I, the wonderful and jealous God, given him everything, and he having received these things has become an adulterer and a sinner?

7. Sedrach Presses Further: On Mercy and the Mule

Sedrach said to him: You, O Lord, created man. You knew what kind of mind he had and what kind of knowledge we possess, and you make it a cause for chastisement. Cast him forth then; for shall I alone not fill up the heavenly places? But if that is not to be so, then save man too, O Lord. He failed by your will, wretched man. Why do you waste words on me, Sedrach? I created Adam and his wife and the sun and said: Behold each other, how bright he is, and the wife of Adam is brighter in the beauty of the moon, and he was the giver of her life. Sedrach said: But what profit are beauties if they pass away into the earth? How did you say, O Lord, you shall not return evil for evil? How is this, O Lord? The word of your divinity never lies, and why do you retaliate against man? Or do you not in so doing render evil for evil? I know that among the four-footed animals there is none so stubborn and unreasonable as the mule. But we strike it with the bridle when we wish. You have angels; send them forth to guard men, and when a man inclines toward sin, to take hold of his foot and not let him go where he would.

8. God Speaks of Free Will, and Sedrach Names What God Loves

God said to him: If I catch him by the foot, he will say, you have given me no joy in the world. But I have left him to his own will because I loved him. Therefore I sent forth my righteous angels to guard him night and day. Sedrach said: I know, O Lord, that of all your creatures you chiefly loved man; of the four-footed animals, the sheep; of woods, the olive; of fruits, the vine; of flying things, the bee; of rivers, the Jordan; of cities, Jerusalem. And all these man also loves, my Lord. God said to Sedrach: I will ask you one thing, Sedrach, and if you answer me, then I may rightly help you, even though you have tested your creator. Sedrach said: Speak. The Lord God said: Since I made all things, how many men were born and how many died, and how many are yet to die, and how many hairs do they have? Tell me, Sedrach, since heaven was created and the earth, how many trees grew in the world, and how many fell, and how many are yet to fall, and how many are yet to arise, and how many leaves do they have? Tell me, Sedrach, since I made the sea, how many waves arose and how many fell, and how many are yet to arise, and how many winds blow along the margin of the sea? Tell me, Sedrach, from the creation of the world through all the ages, when the air rained, how many drops fell upon the world, and how many are yet to fall? And Sedrach said: You alone know all these things, O Lord; you only understand all these things. Only, I pray you, deliver man from chastisement, and I will not be separated from our race.

9. God Commands That Sedrach's Soul Be Taken

And God said to his only-begotten Son: Go, take the soul of Sedrach my beloved, and place it in Paradise. The only-begotten Son said to Sedrach: Give me the trust which our Father deposited in the womb of your mother in the holy tabernacle of your body from childhood. Sedrach said: I will not give you my soul. God said to him: And why was I sent to come here, and you plead against me? For I was commanded by my Father not to take your soul by force. But if not, then give me your most greatly desired soul.

10. Sedrach Asks How His Soul Will Be Taken

And Sedrach said to God: From where do you intend to take my soul, and from which limb? And God said to him: Do you not know that the soul dwells in the heart as in a house, and from there it goes out? For just as a man who goes out of his house and shuts the door behind him, so the soul goes out of the body and the body is shut up and lies without feeling. And Sedrach said: I know, O Lord, that you are merciful and long-suffering and full of compassion, and I will not give you my soul unless you grant me one request. God said to him: What do you ask, Sedrach? And Sedrach said: Have mercy, O Lord, on the sinners. God said to him: How can I have mercy on them when they do not keep my commandments and do not do my will? Sedrach said: Have mercy, O Lord, for your name's sake, since you are called merciful. God said to him: I am merciful and compassionate, and I wait for them that they may repent and turn to me. But they do not repent, and they do not turn to me, and they do not keep my commandments. Sedrach said: Have mercy, O Lord, and diminish the years of man, so that he may not sin so much. God said to him: I will diminish his years and his days, and if he repents in his last days and turns to me with all his heart, I will receive him.

11. Sedrach Asks for a Shorter Time of Repentance

And Sedrach said: O Lord, it is good that you receive him if he repents in his last days. But grant him, O Lord, a space of five years before his death, so that he may repent and turn to you. God said to him: Sedrach, I will grant him a space of five years, and if he repents and turns to me I will receive him. And Sedrach said: O Lord, five years is a long time; grant him three years. God said: Let it be three years. And Sedrach said: O Lord, grant him two years, and one year, and six months, and forty days. And God said to him: Let it be forty days, and if in those forty days he repents and turns to me with all his heart, I will receive him and will not remember his sins. And Sedrach said: O Lord, you are good and merciful, and you receive those who repent. Blessed is the man who repents before he dies, for he shall find mercy before you.

12. The Fate of the Unrepentant and the Mercy of God

And God said to Sedrach: Every man who repents of his sins forty days before his death, I will receive him and will not remember his sins against him. And Sedrach said: O Lord, what of the man who has no forty days before his death? God said: If he has ten days and repents, I will receive him. And if he has only one day and repents with all his heart, I will receive him and will not remember his sins. And Sedrach said: Blessed are you, O Lord, for you are good and merciful and long-suffering, and you receive all who repent. And God said to Sedrach: Every man who repents, I receive him; but the man who does not repent and does not turn to me, I will not receive him, and he shall go into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

13. The Torments of Hell Described

And Sedrach said: O Lord, tell me about the torments of hell, what they are like. And God said to him: There is a fire that is never quenched, and a worm that never sleeps, and outer darkness, and weeping and gnashing of teeth, and a river of fire, and great distress and anguish. And Sedrach said: O Lord, who are those who go into these torments? God said to him: Those who do not believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and those who do not keep my commandments, and those who dishonor their father and mother, and those who commit adultery and fornication, and those who are murderers, and those who are sorcerers and enchanters, and those who worship idols, and those who do not show mercy to the poor. All these shall go into the outer darkness and into the fire that is never quenched.

14. The Blessed in Paradise

And Sedrach said: O Lord, tell me about Paradise and its delights. And God said to him: In Paradise there is no night but only day, and no cold but only warmth, and no sorrow but only joy, and no old age but only youth, and no sickness but only health, and no death but only life, and no darkness but only light. And the righteous shall shine there like the sun, and they shall rejoice and be glad forever, and they shall see my face and be satisfied. And Sedrach said: Blessed are those who are found worthy to enter into Paradise and to see your face, O Lord.

15. Sedrach Yields His Soul

And God said to Sedrach: Now give me your soul, for the time has come. And Sedrach said: O Lord, I will give you my soul, since you have heard my prayer and have granted my requests and have promised mercy to the sinners who repent. Only, O Lord, remember your servant Sedrach and receive my soul in peace. And God said to him: Fear not, Sedrach, for I will receive your soul in peace and will place you in Paradise with all my saints. And Sedrach said: O Lord, I give you my soul; receive it in peace. And he stretched out his hands toward heaven and said: Lord, into your hands I commit my spirit. And immediately his soul departed from his body and the angels received it and carried it up into heaven with hymns and praises.

16. Sedrach Is Placed in Paradise

And God said to the angels: Take the soul of my beloved Sedrach and place it in Paradise in the third heaven, where all my saints rest. And the angels took his soul and placed it in Paradise with great honor and glory. And there was joy in heaven over Sedrach, because he had loved God and had pleaded for the sinners and had not ceased from his prayer until God had promised mercy to all who repent. And so Sedrach rested in Paradise in peace, and his memory is blessed forever and ever. Amen.

Section 11

Sedrach's Lament Over the Body and Soul

Weeping and lamenting, Sedrach began to speak: O marvellous head of heavenly adornment! O one radiant as the sun that shines upon heaven and earth! Your hairs are known from Teman, your eyes from Bosor, your ears from thunder, your tongue from a trumpet, and your brain is a small creation, your head the energy of the whole body. O one friendly and most fair, beloved by all — and now falling into the earth, you must become forgotten.

O hands, mild and fair-fingered, worn with toil by which the body is nourished! O hands, most deft of all, gathering from every quarter and making ready houses! O fingers adorned and decked with gold and silver rings, by which great worlds are guided! The three joints enfold the palms and heap up beautiful things — and now you must become strangers to the world.

O feet, skilfully walking about, self-moving, most swift, unconquerable! O knees, fitted together, for without you the body does not move! The feet run along with the sun and the moon by night and by day, gathering all things — foods and drinks — and nourishing the body. O feet, most swift and fair in running, moving across the face of the earth, making the house ready with every good thing! O feet that bear up the whole body, that run up to the temples making repentance and calling on the saints — and now you are to remain motionless.

O head and hands and feet, until now I have kept you. O soul, what sent you into this humble and wretched body? And now, being separated from it, you are going up to where the Lord calls you, while the wretched body goes away to judgment.

O body well adorned, hair clothed with stars, head of heavenly adornment and dress! O face well anointed, light-bringing eyes, voice like a trumpet, tongue gentle and placable, chin fairly adorned, hairs like the stars, head high as heaven, body decked out, light-bringing eyes that know all things — and now you shall fall into the earth, and beneath the earth your beauty shall disappear.

---