The Greek version of Ben Sira
became very popular with Christian and eventually was incorporated into the
“deuterocanonical” part of the Christian Bible, or, in Protestant Bibles, the
Apocrypha. There it is known as Ecclesiasticus, or, from the Greek rendering of
Yeshua’s patronymic, Sirach. Although the book ultimately was excluded from the
Hebrew Bible, it was discussed and sometimes quoted in Talmud and midrash.
Fragmentary copies of the Hebrew text found at Qumran and Masada attest to its
use by various groups in the first century, and parts of several copies found
in the storeroom of an ancient synagogue in Cairo show that it was still
popular in the Middle Ages. (Wayne A. Meeks, The Moral World of the First
Christians [Library of Early Christianity; Philadelphia, Pa.: The
Westminster Press, 1986], 167-68 n. 4)
