Sirach (Ecclesiasticus)

What Sirach is about

Sirach — also called Ecclesiasticus, the church’s book, because it was read so widely in Christian instruction — is the longest wisdom book in this collection and the only one whose author signs his name. Jesus ben Sirach was a teacher in Jerusalem around 180 BC. His grandson translated the work into Greek and wrote a preface explaining why, which makes this one of the few ancient books whose origin we can describe with confidence.

Its subject matter is daily life, treated at length. There is advice on choosing and keeping friends, on lending money and the awkwardness it causes, on table manners, on grief and how long to mourn, on doctors and medicine, on business honesty, on humility, on the tongue, on how to treat servants, and on the management of a household. Some of it is beautiful. Some of it reflects the assumptions of its time and place in ways modern readers will notice immediately, particularly on women — worth reading with an awareness of the distance between that world and ours, which is true of much ancient literature.

The last section is a long hymn in praise of famous men, walking through Israel’s history from Enoch to the high priest Simon and ending in a description of temple worship. Its opening — Let us now praise famous men — has become one of the best-known lines in English from any of these books.

Where it sits

Sirach stands alongside Proverbs as its closest relative, and the resemblance is close enough that readers often mistake a passage from one for the other. Its influence on Christian teaching has been enormous; the letter of James in particular reads like someone who knew this kind of literature well.

It is received as scripture by Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Protestants value it but do not treat it as canonical, and print it among the Apocrypha when they include it — historically with the note that it is read for instruction of manners rather than to establish doctrine.

Why it is worth reading

Because it is unglamorous, specific, and often very shrewd about how people actually behave. Sirach is the book to dip into rather than read straight through: a page at a time, on friendship or on the tongue, will do more good than fifty chapters at speed.