Texts in Conversation
The Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria uses Sirach as an authoritative guide on moderation and self-control, demonstrating how the Jewish wisdom text influenced early Christian teaching and tradition.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Sirach 31:20
Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus
Deuterocanon
18 And if you sit among many, Don’t reach out your hand before them. 19 How sufficient to a well-mannered man is a very little. He doesn’t breathe heavily in his bed. 20 Healthy sleep comes from moderate eating. He rises early, and his wits are with him. The pain of wakefulness, colic, and griping are with an insatiable man. 21 And if you have been forced to eat, rise up in the middle of it, and you shall have rest. 22 Hear me, my son, and don’t despise me, and in the end you will appreciate my words. In all your works be skillful, and no disease will come to you.
Date: 195–180 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor 2.2
Paedagogus
Early Christian
To me, the star called by the mathematicians Acephalus (headless), which is numbered before the wandering star, his head resting on his breast, seems to be a type of the gluttonous, the voluptuous, and those that are prone to drunkenness. For in such the faculty of reasoning is not situated in the head, but among the intestinal appetites, enslaved to lust and anger. For just as Elpenor broke his neck through intoxication, so the brain, dizzied by drunkenness, falls down from above, with a great fall to the liver and the heart, that is, to voluptuousness and anger: as the sons of the poets say Hephæstus was hurled by Zeus from heaven to earth. The trouble of sleeplessness, and bile, and cholic, are with an insatiable man, it is said.
Date: 198 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... The eighty-fifth of the Apostolical Canons gives a list of the books of the Hebrew Canon, and adds the first three books of the Maccabees and the Wisdom of Sirach; these last four are not, however, included in the Canon, though the Wisdom of Sirach is specially recommended for the instruction of the young. Again, in the Apostolical Constitutions, 6:14, 15, quotations from Sirach are given with the same formula as those from the books of the Hebrew Canon, but in the list given in 2:57 of the same work, there is no mention of any of the books of the Apocrypha ... The evidence of Clement of Alexandria is conflicting; in his Paedagogus he quotes very often from Sirach, and speaks of it as 'scripture', from which it would evidently appear that he regarded it as canonical Scripture; but, according to Eusebius, Clement reckoned Sirach among the 'Antilegomena', for in speaking of Clement's works he mentions the Stromateis, or 'Medleys', and says: 'He quotes in them passages from the disputed Scriptures, the so-called Wisdom of Solomon, for example, and of Jesus the son of Sirach, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, and those of Barnabas, Clement, and Jude ..."
R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford University Press, 1913), 299.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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