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The Wisdom of Ben Sira: A New Translation with Notes and Commentary is unavailable, but you can change that!

The Wisdom of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) contains the sayings of Ben Sira, arguably the last of Israel’s wise men and its first scribe, whose world was defined and dominated by Greek ideas and ideals. This Hellenistic worldview challenged the adequacy of the religion passed down to Palestinian Jews of the second century B.C.E. by their ancestors. Ben Sira’s training in both Judaic and Hellenistic...

Now the question arises: What was the canonical status of our book among Jews before ca. A.D. 90, when the rabbis excluded it from the Jewish canon? It is clear, first of all, that for Greek-speaking Jews both in Palestine and in the Diaspora, The Wisdom of Ben Sira in pre-Christian times was considered one of their sacred writings, for it was included in the LXX. Second, the first-century B.C. Jewish community at Masada had a Hebrew copy of the book that had been written stichometrically, i.e.,
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