Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach

Around 180 BCE a scribe who ran a school in Jerusalem gathered his teaching into one book; near the end, Ben Sira names himself and his city. The book is wisdom literature in the line of Proverbs, short sayings grouped by subject — honouring an ageing father, lending money, choosing friends, behaving at a feast, calling the doctor — and through all of them it argues one thing. Wisdom comes from God and begins with the fear of him, and the wisdom other peoples search for has made its home in Israel as the law God gave to Moses. In chapter 24 Wisdom herself tells how she looked for a resting place among the nations and was sent to live in Jacob; the book identifies her outright with the Torah. He wrote in a Jerusalem ruled by the Seleucid kings of Syria, as foreign influence rose in the city. To those who blame God for their own failings he answers that God set fire and water before each person, and the hand that reaches out is the person's own. Seven closing chapters praise Israel's ancestors from Enoch to Simon son of Onias, a high priest of the author's lifetime, shown in his robes at the altar. About fifty years later the author's grandson took the book to Egypt and put it into Greek. The Greek survived and the Hebrew was lost. The rabbis kept the book 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, yet the Talmud still quotes it. The Latin churches called it Ecclesiasticus, the church book, and the Council of Trent declared it Scripture in 1546; Protestant Bibles that print it set it among the Apocrypha. In 1896 two sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, brought a manuscript leaf back from the East, and Solomon Schechter at Cambridge recognised it as Ben Sira's Hebrew. About two-thirds of the Hebrew has since been recovered from the Cairo Genizah, a synagogue's storeroom for worn-out texts, and a scroll found at Masada in 1964 showed that the medieval Genizah copies descend from the original. The English here is the King James Version of 1611, translated from the grandson's Greek, without his preface; the verse numbers are the King James's.