Sirach: A Teacher Who Had My Name

At a Glance

Who wrote it: A teacher in Jerusalem. In the Greek he signs himself Jesus, the son of Sirach Eleazar (Sirach 50:27). The Hebrew copies call him Simeon, son of Jesus, son of Eleazar, son of Sira. His grandson translated the book into Greek and wrote a preface to it.

When: Written in Hebrew about 180 BC. Translated in Egypt from 132 BC on.

Where it fits: Written in Jerusalem when the land was ruled by Greek kings, not long after the death of the high priest Simon II, whom the book praises (Sirach 50). It is a generation before the Maccabean revolt.

Which Bibles keep it: Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. Protestant Bibles moved it to the Apocrypha, and most later dropped it.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Its rich man who says now will I eat of my goods (Sirach 11:19) is close to my rich fool (Luke 12:19). Its forgive-then-be-forgiven (Sirach 28:2) is in the prayer I taught (Matthew 6:12–15). Its teacher who says Put your neck under the yoke (Sirach 51:26) is close to Take my yoke upon you (Matthew 11:29).

How close it stays to me: Very close on the poor, the worker’s wage and forgiving. Far on women and on slaves.

If you only read three chapters: Sirach 4, Sirach 13 and Sirach 34.

Words to Know

Ecclesiasticus — the book’s old Latin name. It means the church book, probably because churches used it so much for teaching.

Ben Sira — Hebrew for son of Sira, the name the book goes by among Jews and scholars.

Wisdom literature — books of sayings and reflection about how to live, like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job.

Scribe — in this book, a teacher and student of the law, a man with the time to study.

The Book in Brief

The book opens with the grandson’s preface, explaining that he found his grandfather’s book in Egypt and translated it into Greek, and asking pardon for what is lost in translation.

Then come fifty chapters of sayings, poems and advice, much like the book of Proverbs but longer, arranged loosely by subject. Wisdom comes from God and begins with fearing him. A son must honor his parents and care for his old father. Give to the poor and do not make them wait. Be careful with friends, with talk, with debts, with the rich and powerful, with women, with food and wine, with doctors, and with money. Forgive your neighbor if you want to be forgiven. Bring God the sacrifice of justice, not the offerings of stolen goods.

In chapter 24 Wisdom speaks for herself: she came from the mouth of God, looked for a home among all peoples, and was told to settle in Israel, where she became the law of Moses.

In chapters 44 to 50 the teacher praises the famous men of Israel, one after another, from Enoch and Noah through Abraham, Moses, David and the prophets, down to Simon the high priest of his own day, shining as he comes out of the sanctuary.

Chapter 51 is the teacher’s own prayer of thanks, and an invitation to the unlearned to come to his house of instruction and take up the yoke of wisdom.

I have written in this book the instruction of understanding and knowledge, I Jesus, the son of Sirach Eleazar, of Jerusalem (Sirach 50:27).

In my language it is Yeshua. It was a common name. The Hebrew copies of this book make him Simeon, the son of a Yeshua, so the name ran in his family either way. A teacher with my name, or his father’s, sat in Jerusalem about two hundred years before me and wrote down what he had learned about how to live.¹

He was a teacher of the comfortable classes. He tells his students how to behave at a rich man’s dinner, how to deal with officials, how to choose friends. But he had looked hard at how the rich treat the poor, and some of what he wrote about it is as sharp as anything in your Bible.

Do not make the poor wait

Chapter 4 opens like this:

My son, deprive not the poor of his living, And make not the needy eyes to wait long. Make not a hungry soul sorrowful … And defer not to give to him that is in need … Turn not away your eye from one that asks of you (Sirach 4:1–5).

Not just give. Do not make them wait. Do not send them away to come back tomorrow. Anyone who has stood in a line for help knows what this means.

And then: Be as a father to the fatherless, And instead of a husband to their mother: So will you be as a son of the Most High (Sirach 4:10).

I said something very close, about enemies: love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing back; and your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High (Luke 6:35). For this teacher, you become a child of God by caring for orphans and widows. For me, also by loving the people who hate you. It is the same road. I took it further.

Poor men are pasture for the rich

Chapter 13 is about what it is like to be poor among the rich, and it is written by someone who had watched closely.

The rich man does a wrong, and he threatens withal: The poor is wronged, and he will entreat withal (Sirach 13:3). The rich man does wrong and then threatens. The poor man is wronged and then has to apologize.

Wild asses are the prey of lions in the wilderness; So poor men are pasture for the rich (Sirach 13:19).

A rich man speaks, and all keep silence; And what he says they extol to the clouds: A poor man speaks, and they say, Who is this? (Sirach 13:23).

This is not a prophet shouting. This is a quiet teacher telling his students the truth about the world they are going to work in. He does not say the rich are evil. He says the game is rigged, and he wants his students to know it.

The bread of the needy

Then comes the passage that changed a man’s life seventeen centuries later.

He that sacrifices of a thing wrongfully gotten, his offering is made in mockery (Sirach 34:18). As one that kills the son before his father’s eyes Is he that brings a sacrifice from the goods of the poor (Sirach 34:20).

The bread of the needy is the life of the poor: He that depriveth him thereof is a man of blood. As one that slays his neighbor is he that takes away his living; And as a shedder of blood is he that depriveth a hireling of his hire (Sirach 34:21–22).

To withhold a worker’s wage is to shed blood. To give God an offering made from what you squeezed out of the poor is like killing a man’s son in front of him. There are no stronger words in this book.

I said: If therefore you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother (Matthew 5:23–24). And when I sent out my followers, I told them the laborer is worthy of his wages (Luke 10:7). This teacher had already said both.

Go deeperThe priest who read Sirach 34

In 1514, a Spanish priest named Bartolomé de las Casas was living on the island of Cuba. He had come to the Americas as a settler, and like the other settlers he had been granted an encomienda: a group of native people who were forced to work his land and mines in exchange for being taught the Christian faith. Thousands upon thousands of them were dying of overwork, hunger and disease.

That year, preparing a sermon for Pentecost, Las Casas read this passage in his Latin Bible: the offering made from stolen goods, the bread of the needy that is the life of the poor, the man who withholds a worker’s wage as a shedder of blood. He later wrote that the words would not leave him. He decided that everything being done to the native people was unjust, gave up the people granted to him, and began to preach against the system.²

He spent the next fifty years fighting it, as a Dominican friar, a bishop and a writer, arguing before the Spanish court that the peoples of the Americas were fully human and must not be enslaved. He did not win everything, and he made mistakes of his own. But a verse from a book most Protestants have never read turned a slaveholding priest into one of the first great defenders of human rights in the Americas.

Forgive, and then pray

In chapter 28 the teacher says something you have prayed all your life without knowing he said it first.

Forgive your neighbor the hurt that he has done you; And then your sins will be pardoned when you pray. Man cherisheth anger against man; And does he seek healing from the Lord? Upon a man like himself he has no mercy; And does he make supplication for his own sins? (Sirach 28:2–4).

That is the prayer I taught, and what I said after it: For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you don’t forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Matthew 6:14–15).

I did not invent that either. It was already being taught in Jerusalem. What I did was put it at the center of the one prayer I gave you.

The rich man and his goods

The teacher has a sketch of a man who gets rich by being careful and stingy: When he says, I have found rest, And now will I eat of my goods; Yet he knows not what time will pass, And he will leave them to others, and die (Sirach 11:19).

I told the same story with a harvest and barns. My rich man says to himself, Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry. And God says, tonight your soul is required of you (Luke 12:19–20).

The teacher’s advice for what to do with money instead is close to mine. Lose your money for a brother and a friend; And let it not rust under the stone to be lost (Sirach 29:10). I said Don’t lay up treasures for yourselves on the earth, where moth and rust consume (Matthew 6:19).

Go deeperThe lost Hebrew was found in Cairo

For centuries, the Hebrew original of this book was lost to the world. People knew it only in Greek, Latin and Syriac.

In May 1896, two Scottish twin sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, scholars of ancient languages, came back from Cairo with a bundle of old Hebrew pages they had bought. They showed them to Solomon Schechter, a reader in Jewish studies at Cambridge. One leaf made him stop. It was a page of the lost Hebrew Ben Sira.³

It had come from the genizah of an old synagogue in Cairo, a storeroom where worn-out writings with God’s name in them were put away rather than destroyed. Schechter went to Cairo and brought back to Cambridge some 190,000 pages from it. Among them were parts of six medieval copies of Ben Sira.³

Then came the ancient copies. Pieces of the book were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, and in 1964 excavators at Masada, the fortress where the last rebels against Rome held out until AD 73 or 74, found a scroll of several chapters copied before my birth or in my lifetime. Today about two-thirds of the Hebrew original has been recovered.³

That means you can now read much of this book in the very words the teacher wrote, as people in Jerusalem read it in my time.

Come and take the yoke

The book ends with the teacher inviting students to his school.

Draw near to me, you unlearned, And lodge in the house of instruction … Put your neck under the yoke, And let your soul receive instruction … Behold with your eyes, How that I laboured but a little, And found for myself much rest (Sirach 51:23–27).

You have heard words like these from me. Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me … For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matthew 11:28–30).

The teacher invited people to his house of study, to take the yoke of learning. I invited the ones who were too tired and too poor to study, the people carrying burdens, and promised them rest. Same yoke, different people at the door.

Where Sirach and I part

I will not hide the rest of this book from you. It has some of the worst things written about women in any scripture.

Give me … any wickedness but the wickedness of a woman (Sirach 25:13). Better is the wickedness of a man than a pleasant-dealing woman (Sirach 42:14). And the line that would be quoted against women for two thousand years: From a woman was the beginning of sin; And because of her we all die (Sirach 25:24).

Many readers take that as blaming Eve for death. Some scholars think the teacher meant a bad wife, in the passage around it, ruining her husband’s life. Either way, it is a line about women as the source of sin, and it was used that way.⁴

And on slaves: Fodder, a stick, and burdens, for an ass; Bread, and discipline, and work, for a servant … for an evil servant there are racks and tortures (Sirach 33:24, 26). A man, set next to a donkey, and the rack for one who displeases.

The teacher who wrote so sharply about how the rich devour the poor could not see the people closest to him, the women of his house and the slaves who served it, as anything but problems to manage. I let women follow me and learn from me. I said the greatest must be the servant of all. That is the distance between us.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Sirach 34:18–22.

You will find: the offering made from the goods of the poor compared to killing a son before his father’s eyes, and the man who withholds a worker’s wage called a shedder of blood.

Then read Sirach 28:2–4 beside Matthew 6:14–15, and Sirach 51:23–27 beside Matthew 11:28–30.

The Short Version

• Sirach was written in Jerusalem about 180 BC by a teacher who signs himself Jesus, son of Sirach, and translated by his grandson in Egypt.
• It says do not make the poor wait, poor men are pasture for the rich, and withholding a worker’s wage is shedding blood. That passage turned Las Casas against the enslavement of the native peoples of the Americas.
• It taught forgive your neighbor, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray before I put it in the prayer I taught you.
• Its yoke of wisdom and its rest sound like mine, offered to a different crowd.
• It says from a woman was the beginning of sin, and treats slaves like donkeys. That is where it leaves me.
• Its lost Hebrew was found in a Cairo storeroom in 1896, and at Masada in 1964.