Wisdom of Sirach

The book is a wisdom collection in the manner of Proverbs, but far longer, more personal, and clearly the product of one mind and one setting. Ben Sira ran a house of instruction in Jerusalem, taught young men of the governing class, had travelled, and wrote for a Jewish elite living under Ptolemaic and then Seleucid rule with Greek culture pressing on it. His subjects are what such a life presents: choosing friends, lending money, holding your tongue, behaving at a banquet, dealing with physicians, treating slaves, managing daughters, giving alms, honouring parents, avoiding pride, and handling rulers without being ruined by them. Some of it is worldly to the point of coldness, and some of it, his remarks on women in particular, read badly now and read badly to a good many earlier readers too.

Running through the practical material is a theological claim that made the book important. Wisdom, described as pre-existent and searching the earth for a dwelling place, is settled by God in Israel and identified outright with the Torah, the book of the covenant of the Most High. Wisdom is not an international commodity available to any thoughtful person but a national possession attached to a particular law, a particular people and a particular Temple.

The last quarter is a set piece, the praise of the ancestors, running from Enoch through Noah, Abraham, Moses, Aaron, the judges, David, the prophets and the returned exiles to Simon the high priest, whose appearance in the sanctuary Ben Sira describes as an eyewitness might. It is the earliest sustained attempt to present Israel's history as a sequence of exemplary figures, and it doubles as evidence for which scriptures Ben Sira had in front of him.

The grandson's preface is the anchor. He says he came to Egypt in the thirty-eighth year of King Euergetes and there translated his grandfather's Hebrew book for Greek-speaking Jews, apologising for what translation costs a text. Euergetes is Ptolemy VIII, whose thirty-eighth year is 132 BCE, which places the grandfather's composition roughly two generations earlier, around 180 BCE, before the Maccabean crisis, of which the book shows no knowledge. Almost no other Jewish book of the period can be dated so tightly.

The Hebrew original was then lost for the better part of two thousand years, and Sirach was known in Greek, Latin and Syriac. In 1896 fragments of a Hebrew Sirach were identified among material from the Cairo Geniza, the discarded-manuscript store of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat. They were medieval copies, eleventh and twelfth century, but they were Hebrew. Further leaves surfaced over the following decades, and between them the Geniza manuscripts supply roughly two-thirds of the book.

Ancient confirmation followed. Cave 2 at Qumran yielded a small fragment, and the great Psalms scroll from Cave 11 contains a poem also found at the end of Sirach. Then excavation at Masada in the 1960s produced a leather scroll of the first century BCE carrying a substantial run of chapters, and it agrees closely with the medieval Geniza text. That agreement is the decisive result: it showed that the Geniza copies transmit the ancient Hebrew rather than a medieval retranslation out of Greek or Syriac, and it made the Hebrew usable for reconstructing what Ben Sira actually wrote.

Sirach sits in a peculiar position in Jewish tradition: excluded and quoted. The rabbis placed it outside the sacred books, and a passage in the Talmud lists it among works that do not defile the hands, the technical marker of scriptural status. Yet rabbinic literature cites Ben Sira by name and quotes his sayings, sometimes with a formula otherwise reserved for scripture, more often as the words of a respected sage; a much later work, the Alphabet of Ben Sira, borrowed his name outright for material he never wrote. Jews went on reading and copying the Hebrew book for a thousand years after it was ruled out, which is precisely why there was anything for the Geniza to preserve.

Christian use went the other way and went heavily. The book's supply of quotable moral instruction made it a standard text for catechesis and preaching in the Latin church, so standard that it acquired the name Ecclesiasticus, the church book, meaning the one used for teaching in church, and that name rather than the author's still heads it in many Bibles. It is quoted constantly by the Fathers and drawn on in the liturgy.

Its canonical position follows the usual pattern with one wrinkle. Jerome knew it stood outside the Hebrew canon and said so; the western church used it regardless; Trent in 1546 defined it as canonical for Catholics; the Orthodox churches receive it among the books to be read. The reformers put it in the Apocrypha, but Luther, sparing with praise for the disputed books, judged this one genuinely profitable for ordinary readers, and it remained in Protestant devotional use long after some of its neighbours had fallen out of it.