Wisdom of Sirach
🔗Overview
The Wisdom of Sirach, also called Ecclesiasticus, Ben Sira, or the Wisdom of Ben-Sira — is a book of practical instruction and theological reflection written around 180 BC by a Jewish teacher in Jerusalem. Ben Sira addresses the tongue, money, friendship, temper, marriage, and the fear of the Lord. Much of this instruction is arranged in poetic couplets like those in Proverbs.7 Unlike every other book in the Bible, Sirach preserves a first-person preface from its translator (the author's grandson) explaining when, where, why, and under what difficulties the translation was made. The book covers the whole range of wisdom topics and closes with an extended hymn in praise of Israel's faithful ancestors from Enoch through the high priest Simeon II, whose ministry Ben Sira eulogizes in chapter 50.
The UPDV Sirach substantially descends from W. O. E. Oesterley's 1916 English translation, which used the available Hebrew as its base where extant and the Greek elsewhere, while noting Syriac readings where he judged the Greek inferior.1 At particular loci, the UPDV follows witnesses unavailable to Oesterley, including 11Q5 for the chapter 51 poem.10 Where no direct Hebrew survives, the Greek is normally the principal complete witness; the Syriac and, occasionally, the inherited Old Latin tradition are followed where the verse-level evidence favors them.
🔗Why Sirach Is in the UPDV
Sirach is included in the UPDV because it was continuously read, cited, and taught in Jewish and Christian communities from the second century BC forward — in Jerusalem and in the Egyptian Jewish communities for which Ben Sira's grandson translated it, in the Greek-speaking diaspora within which the New Testament was written, and in the Greek, Syriac, and Latin Christian traditions ever since. Its topics and vocabulary resurface in the Letter of James and in parts of the Sermon on the Mount, and the Wisdom-and-Word trajectory it carries runs through John's Prologue. The book is part of the literary and theological background the New Testament assumes.
Sirach is revised in the UPDV with the same care given to every other book: the available witnesses are compared passage by passage, and the same translation conventions (brackets for textual insertions, footnotes for significant variants) are used throughout the Bible.
🔗Chapter and Verse Numbering
The historical chapter and verse numbering has generally been followed. This allows easier comparison to other versions and use of reference works. Where the Hebrew and Greek traditions disagree on verse numbering, the UPDV follows the standard reference numbering of the Greek tradition for navigability while evaluating the surviving witnesses passage by passage.
🔗Title and Alternate Names
The book is known under several names:
- Wisdom of Sirach: the most common English title, used as the UPDV's primary name.
- Sirach: short form, used in most cross-references.
- Ben Sira / Ben-Sira: "son of Sira," reflecting the author's family name. Used especially in Jewish and scholarly discussion. The hyphen is sometimes omitted.
- Wisdom of Ben-Sira: compound form, emphasizing the author.
- Ecclesiasticus — the Latin church's title, literally "the Ecclesiastical [Book]," reflecting the book's heavy use in Christian liturgy and catechesis from the early centuries onward.
🔗The Grandson's Prologue
Sirach is the only book in the Bible with a first-person translator's preface. The grandson of Ben Sira, writing in Egypt sometime after 132 BC, introduces his translation with a remarkable explanation of what he did and why. He asks his readers to undertake the reading "with kindliness and attentiveness, and to be indulgent if in any parts of what we have laboured to interpret we seem to fall short in [the rendering of] some of the phrases. For when things spoken in Hebrew are translated into another tongue they have not quite the same meaning."1
Three things from the Prologue frame the rest of the book:
1. Provenance. The book was written by "my grandfather Jesus" (Yeshua ben Eleazar ben Sira) in Hebrew, as a work of instruction in the tradition of the Law, the Prophets, and the other ancestral books. The grandson translated it into Greek for Greek-speaking Jews "in the land of their sojourning" who wished to live according to the Law.
2. Date. The grandson says he came to Egypt "in the thirty-eighth year under king Euergetes." Reckoned from the first regnal year of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II (170 BC), this places his arrival at 132 BC. Working backward, his grandfather's composition of the original Hebrew falls in the 180s BC: after the death of the high priest Simeon II around 196 BC (whom the Hebrew eulogizes in chapter 50) but before the Maccabean crisis of 167 BC (which the book shows no awareness of).
3. Translation difficulty. The grandson openly acknowledges that his Greek does not always capture the Hebrew perfectly: and that this is a general problem with translating the Hebrew scriptures. The surviving Hebrew manuscripts allow his Greek to be checked where both texts exist. At Sirach 51:13–20, comparison with 11Q5 shows both expansion (the Greek adds prayer before the temple at 51:13–14) and recasting, including a shift from vivid imagery at 51:19 to more explicitly moral language.10
🔗Historical Context
Ben Sira wrote in Jerusalem around 180 BC. By that time Aramaic had become the wider region's lingua franca, while Hebrew remained a living literary and religious language throughout the Second Temple period.8 Ben Sira's choice to write in Hebrew, and in a register that consciously echoes the classical poetry of Proverbs and Psalms, is a deliberate literary stance: he was writing scripture-adjacent wisdom in the language of scripture.
The book sits at a crossroads. It comes after the era of the classic prophets (such as Malachi) and before the Maccabean period. It belongs to the Second Temple period at its most settled moment — before the Hellenistic crisis fractured Jewish society, before the Hasmonean priest-kings, before Qumran, before the rabbinic movement. Ben Sira writes as a Jerusalem sage, probably teaching students, addressing young men in training for public and scribal life. His book is in many ways one of the clearest surviving windows into Jewish piety and pedagogy in the early second century BC.
The book has one foot in the Old Testament wisdom tradition (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job) and one foot in the world the New Testament presupposes. Ben Sira's voice is recognizably continuous with Proverbs; his topics and vocabulary recur in James, in parts of the Sermon on the Mount, and in rabbinic citation.
🔗The Hebrew Manuscripts
For most of Christian history, Sirach was known only in Greek, Syriac, Latin, and occasional rabbinic quotations. The Hebrew text had fallen out of use — in part because late-antique rabbinic tradition treated Sirach as outside the canon, reducing the institutional pressure to copy and preserve it. By the Middle Ages, the Hebrew had effectively been lost.
That changed in stages over the course of a century. Taken together, the recovered Hebrew represents roughly two-thirds of the book.5
🔗Cairo Genizah (1896–1900, with later identifications)
In 1896, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson bought a Hebrew leaf in southern Palestine; Solomon Schechter identified it as part of MS B.2 Additional Genizah fragments of MSS A–D were published through 1900, and MS E was identified in 1931. Scheiber found the fragment now called MS F in 1982; Di Lella later recognized it as a separate sixth manuscript.5 The six medieval manuscripts date approximately from the 10th to the 13th centuries.5 MS B is the largest Genizah witness. MSS A, C, D, E, and F cover varying portions with varying quality. Scholars once suspected some sections might be medieval retroversions from Syriac, but the Masada scroll's publication confirmed that the Genizah manuscripts descend from ancient Hebrew copies.9 The one widely accepted exception is MS B's form of Sirach 51:13–30, which is substantially a retroversion from Syriac.9
🔗Masada (1964)
Yigael Yadin's excavation of Masada recovered a Hebrew scroll preserving portions of chapters 39:27–44:17, dated on the basis of the handwriting style to the first half of the 1st century BC — roughly a century after the book's original composition.3 Its age and breadth make it an important witness, but its readings are evaluated passage by passage with the other witnesses.
🔗Qumran (1952, 1956)
Two very small fragments were identified in the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus: 2Q18 (a fragment of chapter 6) and a passage of chapter 51 embedded in 11QPsᵃ (11Q5), the Psalms scroll from Cave 11. The Qumran material is ancient (1st c. BC–1st c. AD) but minimal in coverage.
🔗Translation Methodology
The UPDV Sirach is revised from a layered witness set evaluated passage by passage. The table below inventories those witnesses6 rather than assigning them a fixed hierarchy.
🔗Witness inventory
| Witness | Role |
|---|---|
| Masada scroll (1st c. BC) | Ancient Hebrew witness to portions of 39:27–44:17. Important for its age and breadth, but evaluated passage by passage. |
| Qumran fragments (1st c. BC–1st c. AD) | Ancient Hebrew fragments with minimal coverage. The surviving part of the chapter 51 poem in 11Q5 supplies the Hebrew base where MS B is secondary. |
| Cairo Genizah MSS (10th–13th c.) | Largest body of surviving Hebrew. MS B supplies the working Hebrew text where it is extant and internally coherent; the other witnesses serve as clarifiers and controls. |
| Greek (the grandson, ~132 BC) | Oldest complete witness and normally the principal witness where no direct Hebrew survives; elsewhere weighed with the Hebrew and other versions. |
| Syriac Peshitta | Ancient Semitic version, sometimes followed where it preserves the preferred reading. In the chapter 51 poem, MS B depends on the Syriac and cannot be counted as an independent second witness. |
| Old Latin (transmitted in the Vulgate) | A Greek-derived version with a complicated textual history; secondary evidence for early Greek variants. |
| Talmudic citations (3rd–6th c. AD) | Corroborating quotations. Chronologically bridge Masada and the Genizah. Useful for locking in ancient readings but often paraphrastic.4 |
Readings are compared at the level of the passage or colon, not by automatic preference for a language or date. Where MS B is extant and internally coherent, the UPDV uses it as the working Hebrew text unless the other evidence shows that a reading is secondary. Sirach 51:13–30 is a special case: MS B's form of the poem is secondary, so the witnesses are weighed without an incumbent and dependent witnesses are not counted twice.
🔗Rabbinic Citation
Despite the rabbinic move to treat Sirach as outside the canon, the book remained in constant use. Sanhedrin 100b is the defining passage: Rav Yosef formally prohibits reading Ben Sira, but Abaye immediately challenges every "problematic" verse by producing Torah and Rabbinic parallels, and Rav Yosef concedes: "Even though there are passages in the book that are inappropriate, we teach the superior matters that are in it even in public."4 The prohibition was not absolute in practice. Even earlier, the Tosefta had already classified Ben Sira among the books that "do not defile the hands": "The scrolls of Ben Sira and all scrolls that are written from that point forward: they do not defile the hands" (Yadayim 2:13).4 The Bavli quotes or alludes to Ben Sira across a dozen or more tractates: including Sanhedrin, Bava Kamma, Yevamot, Chagigah, Bava Batra, Niddah, and Ketubot: with the citations often tracking the Hebrew tradition rather than the Greek. This is chronologically independent support for the view that the Genizah manuscripts preserve genuine ancient readings.
🔗Source Text
This translation of Sirach was not derived from the ASV, which was the starting point for the rest of the UPDV (except First Maccabees and The Epistle to the Greeks). The UPDV Sirach substantially descends from Oesterley's 1916 English translation.1 At particular loci, the UPDV follows witnesses unavailable to Oesterley, including 11Q5 for Sirach 51:13–20.10 The current method compares the available Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Old Latin, and other evidence passage by passage.
1 Oesterley, W. O. E., trans. The Wisdom of Ben-Sira (Ecclesiasticus). Translations of Early Documents, Series I: Palestinian Jewish Texts (Pre-Rabbinic). London: SPCK, 1916. Prologue; Introduction, "The Hebrew Manuscripts" and "Bibliography" (translation procedure). Compare Oesterley's wording at Sirach 3:3–4, 24:4–5, and 44:10–13 with the present UPDV text. Swete's Greek text reads: "ἐν γὰρ τῷ ὀγδόῳ καὶ τριακοστῷ ἔτει ἐπὶ τοῦ Εὐεργέτου βασιλέως παραγενηθείς εἰς Αἴγυπτον."
2 Schechter, Solomon and Charles Taylor. The Wisdom of Ben Sira: Portions of the Book Ecclesiasticus from Hebrew Manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah Collection Presented to the University of Cambridge by the Editors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899. Rey and Reymond, A Critical Edition of the Hebrew Manuscripts of Ben Sira, ix, identify the 1896 leaf as Sirach 39:15–40:7 in modern numbering; the Schechter–Taylor preface numbers it 39:15–40:8.
3 Skehan, Patrick W., and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987), Introduction VIII, §1.E, "The Masada Scroll." The Masada scroll is also published as Yigael Yadin. The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and the Shrine of the Book, 1965. The scroll was recovered during the 1963–1965 Masada excavations. Paleographic dating places it in the first half of the 1st century BC.
4 Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 100b. Translation adapted from the William Davidson edition (Koren Publishers, Jerusalem). Additional Sirach citations in the Bavli at Bava Kamma 92b, Yevamot 63b, Chagigah 13a, Bava Batra 98b and 146a, Niddah 16b, and Ketubot 110b; in the minor tractate Kallah Rabbati ch. 3; and in the Tosefta, Yadayim 2:13, "The scrolls of Ben Sira and all scrolls that are written from that point forward, they do not defile the hands", the earliest rabbinic attestation of Ben Sira's book, classifying it within the "defile the hands" canon formula.
5 The current standard critical edition of the Hebrew Ben Sira manuscripts is Rey, Frédérique Michèle, and Eric D. Reymond, A Critical Edition of the Hebrew Manuscripts of Ben Sira: With Translations and Philological Notes, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 217 (Leiden: Brill, 2024), ix–xi. The UPDV Sirach translation predates this edition; later methodological review draws on it where applicable.
6 Skehan and Di Lella, AYB 39, Introduction VIII, §1.A–F, §3.A–C, and §4, surveys the Hebrew manuscripts, the Greek, Old Latin, and Syriac versions, and the book's textual criticism. See also W. O. E. Oesterley, The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach or Ecclesiasticus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), chap. 7 §§1–3, on the Greek, Syriac, and Old Latin. The UPDV's adopted versional readings are documented in its footnotes at Sirach 1:3, 1:8, 1:10, 2:1, 2:18, and 17:5–10.
7 Skehan and Di Lella, AYB 39, Introduction IX, "The Poetry of Ben Sira" — Ben Sira's poetry is "mostly bicola with a rare tricolon," and the basic sense unit is the bicolon. See also Luke L. Cheung, The Genre, Composition and Hermeneutics of the Epistle of James (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2003), chap. 1, "Ben Sira," citing Skehan and Di Lella 1987:26 on Ben Sira's use of parallelism.
8 Lexham Bible Dictionary, s.v. "Hebrew Language," § "Setting of Hebrew among the Language Families of the Ancient Near East" — Hebrew continued as a living language into the Second Temple period. See also T&T Clark Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism, s.v. "Aramaic," on Aramaic as the wider region's lingua franca and international language.
9 Jan Joosten, "The Hebrew of the Ben Sira Manuscripts from the Genizah," in Discovering, Deciphering and Dissenting: Ben Sira Manuscripts after 120 Years, ed. James K. Aitken, Renate Egger-Wenzel, and Stefan C. Reif, DCLS (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 319–330. Joosten notes that since the Masada scroll's publication, "almost all Hebrew scholars have accepted that the Genizah manuscripts are for the most part NOT to be understood as back-translations." The one exception "widely accepted" as retroversion is the Psalm in Sir 51:13-30.
10 Rey and Reymond, A Critical Edition of the Hebrew Manuscripts of Ben Sira, 264, for the 11Q5 text; Joseph Ziegler, ed., Sapientia Iesu Filii Sirach, Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum XII/2, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), Sirach 51:13–20, for the Greek; Skehan and Di Lella, AYB 39, notes on Sirach 51:13b, 18b, and 19, for the comparison.