Thursday, December 29, 2022

Wayne A. Meeks on on the Book of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus)

 

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)