Yeshu’a ben El’azar ben Sira (or “Sirach,” as his name appears in the Greek translation of his book) was a sage who wrote his book toward the beginning of the second century b.c.e., around the year 180 or so. From Hebrew the book was subsequently translated into Greek (by Ben Sira’s own grandson) and became part of the Greek Bible of early Christianity; other ancient versions were made into Syriac and Latin (in which language it came to be known as “Ecclesiasticus”). Ben Sira’s book was particularly beloved to the founders of rabbinic Judaism, but apparently because his identity was well known and the book was not attributed to some ancient worthy from the biblical past, they felt that it could not be included in the rabbinic canon of Scripture, and the original Hebrew version of it was therefore eventually lost.
Ben Sira saw in Scripture a great corpus of divine wisdom; he therefore made broad use of Scripture in writing his own book, including his lengthy catalog of biblical heroes mentioned earlier. But he was a conservative in all things—a “classicist,” one might say—and this catalog contains relatively little that is not explicitly stated in Scripture itself. He certainly was aware of many interpretive traditions, which, for one reason or another, he chose not to include in his book. This notwithstanding, the book does contain a number of interpretations from a relatively early stage of development.

The textual problems connected with the book are notorious. Although composed in Hebrew, it was known for centuries only through its Greek and Syriac versions and secondary translations made from these. Medieval copies of portions of the Hebrew original were discovered at the end of last century in the Cairo Geniza fragments, and these have been supplemented by further Hebrew finds at Qumran and Masada, so that now slightly less than 70 percent of the Hebrew original is extant. Recent scholarship, however, has suggested that the original text-form in Hebrew was expanded at one point, and that both the original and expanded forms are represented in various manuscripts of the subsequent translations. To complicate matters further, the medieval copies of the Hebrew themselves frequently disagree or contain obvious errors; some scholars also suspect that the medieval Hebrew copyists may at times have sought to supplement their lacunary text(s) by retroverting from one of the ancient versions.