Monday, May 30, 2022

John J. Collins on the Positive Attitude the Rabbis Had Towards the Book of Sirach

  

. . . we read in b. Sanhedrin 100b: “R. Joseph said: Even though the rabbis withdrew the book of Ben Sira, we expound all the good passages contained in it (Leiman, Canonization of Hebrew Scripture, 95). The book is cited several times in the Talmud and the midrash (Leiman, Canonization of Hebrew Scripture, 96-97). Sid Leiman suggested that Ben Sira was regarded as “uninspired canonical literature” (Leiman, Canonization of Hebrew Scripture, 100), but that category is exceedingly problematic. Ben Sira may have been popular and regarded as good to read, at least in part, but it was not accorded the same status as the so-called canonical books. We might compare the attitude of Athanasius to the seven books, including Ben Sira, that were recommended for reading, even though they were not canonical.

 

It does not appear, then, that the rabbis had any ideological quarrel with Ben Sira. It may be that his book was not canonized because it was transparently the work of a human author of a relatively late period. Daniel could be accepted because it was supposed to have been composed centuries earlier, at the time of the Babylonian exile. It is somewhat ironic that Ben Sira’s candor about his authorship may he thwarted his desire to have his work accepted among the “other writings” that carried authority in Jewish tradition. (John J. Collins, “The Penumbra of the Cannon: What Do the Deuterocanonical Books Represent?” in Ancient Jewish and Christian Scriptures: New Developments in Canon Controversy, ed. John J. Collins, Craig A. Evans, and Lee Martin McDonald [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2020], 17)