Sirach

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Sirach is a Jewish wisdom book composed in Hebrew in Jerusalem early in the second century BCE, named for its author and traditionally counted among the “hidden” books that fall outside the Hebrew Bible. It carries two older names: Ecclesiasticus, “the church book,” from its heavy use in early Christian instruction, and Ben Sira, after the man who wrote it. Among the apocryphal and deuterocanonical literature it is unusual in naming its author at all — Jeshua ben Eleazar ben Sira, a scribe and teacher who ran what amounted to a school in Jerusalem around 180 BCE, in the last decades before the upheaval of the Maccabean revolt. The book is, among other things, a record of what such a school taught: how a learned man read the older scriptures, conducted himself among the powerful, raised his children, chose his friends, and held his tongue.

The author and his two names

A scribe in Ben Sira’s Jerusalem occupied a definite station. He was not a priest, though he revered the priesthood; he was a man of leisure enough to study, who had traveled, served the great, and absorbed the accumulated proverb of his people and of the surrounding Hellenistic world. He addresses his readers as my son, the standard idiom of the wisdom teacher, and presents wisdom as a discipline with a curriculum and a cost. The book’s self-naming is itself a piece of evidence: most of the apocrypha come down anonymous or pseudonymous, ascribed to Solomon or Baruch or some ancient worthy, but this collection signs itself, and the grandson’s preface signs it again. The double name preserves both the man and the book’s afterlife — Ecclesiasticus, the Latin title that fixed it as the catechist’s manual of the Western church, beside Ben Sira, the patronymic by which Jewish tradition went on calling its author for a thousand years after declining to canonize him.

A legible transmission

The book’s history is legible in a way few ancient texts allow. Ben Sira wrote in Hebrew around 180 BCE; some decades later his grandson, having emigrated to Egypt — almost certainly to Alexandria — translated the work into Greek and prefaced it with a short note explaining the difficulty of carrying one language’s wisdom into another. The grandson dates his own arrival in Egypt to the thirty-eighth year of the reign of Euergetes, that is, Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II, which places it in 132 BCE and the translation somewhat after. That prologue is one of the earliest surviving pieces of translator’s self-reflection from antiquity: he warns that what is said in Hebrew loses force when turned into another tongue, an apology for the seams that any reader of a translation will find, and the first such caveat to come down to us in a biblical book.

The Greek version entered the Septuagint — the Alexandrian Greek scriptures of Hellenistic Judaism — and through it the book reached the wider world. The Hebrew original was meanwhile lost to most readers and known only through the Greek and its daughter versions in Latin, Syriac, and beyond. Then, between 1896 and 1900, it began to return. The Scottish twins Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson brought a parcel of leaves back from Cairo; Solomon Schechter, examining them at Cambridge, recognized the Hebrew of Ben Sira, settling a standing dispute over whether the book had ever existed in Hebrew at all. Schechter went to Cairo and emptied much of the storeroom of the Ben Ezra synagogue — the Cairo Geniza, where worn sacred manuscripts had been laid to rest rather than destroyed — into what became the Taylor–Schechter Collection. Six medieval manuscripts of Ben Sira surfaced there, designated A through F, ranging from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and together they restored a large fraction of the Hebrew text, roughly two-thirds of the book.

The six Geniza manuscripts overlap and complement one another. The most extensive, manuscripts A and B, between them cover large stretches from the third chapter to the fifty-first; B is written stichometrically, line by poetic line, and carries marginal variants that themselves preserve readings from a different Hebrew tradition. Manuscript C is a florilegium, an anthology of selected verses copied for use rather than a continuous text. They are medieval — eleventh and twelfth centuries — and the question of how faithfully they transmit a text twelve hundred years older than themselves was, for a time, genuinely open.

Two older witnesses sealed the recovery. At Masada, in 1964, Yigael Yadin excavated a scroll preserving chapters 39 through 44 in Hebrew, copied no later than the fortress’s fall in the first century CE and differing only in small details from the medieval Cairo manuscript a thousand years its junior. At Qumran the Dead Sea finds yielded fragments of chapter 6 and, in the great Psalms scroll, the acrostic poem that closes the book. The convergence of a first-century Hebrew scroll with a twelfth-century Cairo codex did the decisive work: it showed that the medieval copies were not late retranslations from the Greek or the Syriac, as some had argued, but genuine descendants of the ancient Hebrew. The Greek had carried the substance faithfully across the centuries — a verdict the buried Hebrew now allows one to check rather than assume.

The teaching

Most of the book is practical, and deliberately so. It collects maxims on friendship and its testing, the management of money and the snares of wealth, speech and silence and the discipline of the table, the raising of children and the governing of a household, the dangers of pride and the uses of shame. The counsel is concrete and often hard-edged: how to lend without being ruined, how to bear oneself before a ruler, when to trust a man and when never to, how to mourn and when to stop, how a daughter’s keeping weighs on a father, how the poor man is ignored and the rich man’s blunders excused. Chapter 38 pauses to honor the physician and his medicines as themselves a gift of God, set beside the proper rites of grief — an unusually warm word for the healing art in this literature, and a sign of a teacher willing to find the divine ordering in the practical professions rather than only in the schools. There is a famous and much-debated portion on the place of women that has drawn both Ben Sira’s admirers and his critics, and a long passage exalting the dignity of the scribe over the trades and crafts that, however necessary, leave no leisure for wisdom.

The sayings are gathered without strict system, in the loose accumulative manner of the older book of Proverbs, though Ben Sira works in longer, more reflective units than the terse couplets of his model, sometimes building a sustained meditation across a dozen verses. Where the skeptical Ecclesiastes — a separate canonical book whose Greek-derived name is easily confused with this one — turns the wisdom inheritance toward the limits of what effort can secure against death, Ben Sira keeps faith with the older confidence that the world rewards the prudent and the upright. He knows the difficulty; he addresses the prosperity of the wicked and the suffering of the just, and answers it not with Qoheleth’s resignation but with the conviction that judgment falls at the last day of a life, that death is a reckoning the proud forget at their cost. His was a world on the edge of crisis — within a generation of his teaching the Hellenizing high priests and the Seleucid suppression of the cult would provoke the Maccabean rising — and his book reads, in hindsight, like the settled piety of a Jerusalem about to be shaken: at ease with Greek manners and Greek proverb, unyielding on the Temple, the Law, and the priesthood as the fixed center of the world.

Running beneath the advice is a single conviction: that wisdom and the fear of the Lord are the same pursuit, and that the wisdom sought in daily prudence is continuous with the Wisdom by which the world was made. The opening chapter sets the key — wisdom is from the Lord and was created before all things — and the practical counsel that follows is offered as the working-out, in the conduct of an ordinary life, of that cosmic order. This is the move that distinguishes Ben Sira from a mere anthologist of good sense: he binds the etiquette of the banquet and the choosing of a friend to the structure of creation itself.

Wisdom in her own voice

In the twenty-fourth chapter that figure speaks for herself. Wisdom, present before creation and proceeding from the mouth of the Most High, ranges over heaven and the deep seeking a resting place, and is commanded to make her dwelling in Jacob and to take root in Israel — to settle, of all the earth, in Jerusalem and minister in the holy tent. The text then makes an identification that would prove consequential: this Wisdom is the Law, the Torah given through Moses, named here the book of the covenant of the Most High. The universal ordering principle of the cosmos and the particular legislation of one people are declared the same thing. It is one of the boldest equations in the wisdom literature, and it gave later thought a ready bridge between Greek speculation about a divine reason and the Jewish conviction that revelation came through the covenant.

That personified Wisdom is where the book reaches beyond its own tradition. The same figure — Hebrew Hokmah, Greek Sophia — recurs across Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon, and later Jewish and Christian speculation. In Alexandria, Philo would refine the cognate idea of a mediating divine Reason into the developed doctrine of the Logos, and Christian writers in turn would read this Wisdom as a forerunner of the divine Word. These were not later projections onto an indifferent text — the kinship was felt early, and the chapter 24 identification of Wisdom with the Torah gave it a foothold. Yet Ben Sira himself stops at the figure and does not argue it into a system. He leaves Wisdom enthroned in Jerusalem and resident in the Law, and lets the speculative machinery be built by others; what he supplies is the image those others would quarry.

The Praise of the Fathers

The book closes with a long hymn, the “Praise of the Fathers,” that turns from counsel to memory. It opens with a call to praise the famous men and the fathers of old, and processes through Israel’s worthies in order — Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses and Aaron and Phinehas, Joshua and the judges, Samuel and Nathan and David and Solomon, the prophets, on to Nehemiah and the restoration. Where Sadducees and others in the period contested how Israel’s past authorized its present, Ben Sira’s roll of the faithful makes its own quiet argument: that the covenant runs unbroken through priests and kings and prophets down to the living institution of the Temple. The procession climaxes, pointedly, in the present — in Simon son of Onias, the high priest of the author’s own day, described in the full liturgical splendor of his service at the altar, the cosmos itself seeming to attend the rite. The book that began with Wisdom created before all things ends with a man the author had seen, robed and officiating, as if the whole long descent of wisdom had come to rest in the worship of the Second Temple.

Text and study

The modern study of Ben Sira is in large part the study of a text recovered in pieces, and the standard apparatus reflects it. The Greek tradition survives in two forms — a shorter original translation and a later expanded recension, often labeled GI and GII — and the Hebrew is a mosaic assembled from the Geniza, Masada, and Qumran witnesses. Pancratius C. Beentjes gathered the whole Hebrew record into a single working tool in The Book of Ben Sira in Hebrew (Brill, 1997), a text edition and synopsis of all the extant manuscripts found between 1896 and 1982. The fullest English commentary remains Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira (Anchor Bible 39, Doubleday, 1987), which sets a fresh translation against the reconstructed Hebrew. For the Greek as the Septuagint carried it, Benjamin G. Wright’s translation and introduction in the New English Translation of the Septuagint treat the grandson’s version on its own terms, attentive to where it mirrors and where it departs from the Hebrew source. The ongoing collation of every Hebrew witness, with images and transcriptions, is maintained at the open Book of Ben Sira project. An earlier and now public-domain English rendering, with the apocrypha set whole in one place, is the second volume of R. H. Charles’s Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913).

The book sits at a junction in the history of Second Temple Judaism: a confident, pre-revolt wisdom, written in Hebrew by a Jerusalem scribe who had no quarrel with Greek learning and every loyalty to the covenant, and then carried into Greek by a grandson in Egypt who feared exactly the loss of force that translation brings. Its standing among the scriptures divided along the same seam that would separate the larger canons. The Greek-speaking church inherited the book inside the Septuagint and made it a staple of moral instruction, which is precisely how it earned the name Ecclesiasticus; the early councils that listed the books for the Latin West kept it, and the Catholic canon affirmed it among the deuterocanonical books at the Council of Trent in 1546.

The rabbis took a different path, and a more intricate one than a simple exclusion. The book fell outside the Hebrew canon — judged, in the later reckoning, to have been written too late for the age of inspiration, and the more suspect for the authority Christians had come to grant it. Yet it was never forgotten. The Talmud and the early rabbinic literature quote Ben Sira by name on something like a dozen occasions, citing his sayings in the manner reserved for a sage rather than for a book of scripture, attaching his name to the saying as one would a living teacher’s. Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches receive Sirach as scripture; Jewish and most Protestant canons set it outside, though Jewish tradition went on quoting Ben Sira by name long after declining to canonize him.

→ In the library: Charles — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913)

→ Related: Book Of Tobit · Book Of Baruch · Logos · Proverbs · Ecclesiastes · Book Of Wisdom · Apocrypha · Deuterocanonical Books · Second Temple Judaism · Philo Of Alexandria · Sadducees · Torah