times it served as an educational centre as well as a place of prayer and worship. ‘Profane’ learning was certainly available in the Hellenistic cities in Palestine and beyond for those Jews who had the means and the disposition to pursue it, and many Jewish authors both before and after the time of Ben Sira elected to write in Greek. But the basic education, at least for traditional Jews, was in Torah. Thus Josephus, a well-educated man if no great thinker, informs us in his autobiography that ‘while