In one passage of his book, the ploughman, the smith and the potter keep a city standing, and none of them is called to the council or sits in the judge's seat. Wisdom, the passage goes on, needs leisure. It belongs to the man free to study the law of the Most High, to travel among foreign peoples and to serve before rulers. That man was the author's ideal and, as far as his book shows, his own life. Ben Sira was a scribe in Jerusalem who taught young men in what he called his house of learning, and near the end of his book he wrote his name into it. The Greek gives it as Jesus son of Sirach of Jerusalem; in the Hebrew he is Yeshua son of Eleazar son of Sira, though the surviving copies give the family line in different forms.
Almost everything known of him comes from that book. He says he travelled, saw more than he could put into words, and was often in danger of death, without saying where. Historians place the writing between about 190 and 175 BCE, in a Jerusalem that the Seleucid kings of Syria had taken from Egypt's Ptolemies. He praised the high priest, Simon son of Onias, for repairing the Temple and fortifying the city's walls. Foreign, Greek-speaking influence was rising in the city, and the book urges its readers to keep God's commandments against it. Within a generation the Seleucid king Antiochus IV moved against Jewish worship itself; the book shows no sign of that persecution.
His answer to the pull of Greek learning was to claim wisdom for Israel. Earlier wisdom books, Proverbs among them, had taught a good life from what the elders handed down and what anyone could see, with little said of Israel's own history or law. Ben Sira identified wisdom outright with that law, the Torah. In chapter 24 Wisdom speaks for herself: she came from the mouth of the Most High, looked for a resting place among all the peoples, and was told by her Creator to settle in Jacob. All of this, he adds, is the book of the covenant, the law that Moses commanded. The beginning of that wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and its limit is plain: do not search out what is too hard for you, but think about what you have been commanded.
He would not let anyone blame God for sin. God set fire and water before each person, he wrote, and each stretches out a hand to whichever they choose. Reward and punishment come in this life, in a good name and in children, because the dead in Sheol, the shadowy underworld, no longer praise God. He speaks of neither resurrection nor an immortal soul. Within that frame he is practical. He tells his pupils to honour a doctor, because the Lord created medicines from the earth and the wise do not despise them, and to care for a father whose mind is failing. His warnings about wives and daughters run long and suspicious, and one verse traces sin and death to the first woman.
His grandson carried the book to Egypt, arriving in 132 BCE, and translated it into Greek for the Jews there. The rabbis left it out of their Bible, and a saying attributed to Rabbi Akiva, the second-century sage, counts its readers among those who lose the world to come. The Talmud quotes it all the same, citing his warning against searching out hidden things as a limit on speculation about God's throne. The churches read it in Greek and Latin as Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, and the Council of Trent declared it Scripture in 1546. His Hebrew was lost for centuries, until a manuscript leaf from the Cairo Genizah, a synagogue's storeroom for worn-out texts, reached Solomon Schechter at Cambridge in 1896. A scroll found at Masada in 1964 confirmed that the Genizah Hebrew descends from what Ben Sira wrote.