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Jesus Ben Sira

Sirach

Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus

About this book

Faithfulness in Trials

Chapter 2

1 My son, if you come to serve the Lord, prepare your soul for testing.⁠ 2 Set your heart right and endure steadily. Do not be hasty in a time of disaster. 3 Cling to him, and do not leave him, so that you may prosper at the end. 4 Accept whatever is brought on you, and be patient when you suffer humiliation.⁠ 5 For gold is tested in the fire, and people who are acceptable to God in the furnace of humiliation.⁠ 6 Put your trust in him, and he will help you. Make your ways straight, and set your hope on him.

Trust in God’s Mercy

7 All you who fear the Lord, wait for his mercy. Do not turn aside, so that you do not fall.⁠ 8 All you who fear the Lord, put your trust in him, and your reward will not fail. 9 All you who fear the Lord, hope for good things, and for eternal gladness and mercy. 10 Look at the generations of the past and see. Who ever put their trust in the Lord, and was put to shame? Or who continued to fear him and was abandoned? Or who called on him and was neglected? 11 For the Lord is full of compassion and mercy. He forgives sins and saves in time of distress.⁠

Warnings against Faithlessness

12 How terrible for fearful hearts, to powerless hands, and to the sinner who follows two paths! 13 How terrible for the fainthearted! For they do not believe, so they will not be protected. 14 How terrible for you who have lost your patience! And what will you all do when the Lord comes to you?

Those Who Fear the Lord

15 Those who fear the Lord will not disobey his words. Those who love him will keep his ways. 16 Those who fear the Lord will seek his good pleasure. Those who love him will be filled with the law. 17 Those who fear the Lord will prepare their hearts, and will humble their souls in his sight. 18 We will fall into the hands of the Lord, and not into the hands of people, for his mercy is as great as his majesty.

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Texts in conversation

Compare Deuteronomy 8:2 and Jesus Ben Sira, Sirach 2:1

Hebrew Bible · Deuterocanon

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Summary

Sirach describes the faithful being tested through trials, echoing Deuteronomy 8 where Israel’s forty years in the wilderness are portrayed as a test of obedience. Both texts present difficulty not as abandonment but as a means of revealing character.

Passages

Deuteronomy 8:2

Hebrew Bible
1 You must keep carefully all these commandments I am giving you today so that you may live, increase in number, and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised to your ancestors. 2 Remember the whole way by which he has brought you these 40 years through the wilderness so that he might, by humbling you, test you to see if you have it within you to keep his commandments or not. 3 So he humbled you by making you hungry and then feeding you with unfamiliar manna. He did this to teach you that humankind cannot live by bread alone, but also by everything that comes from the Lord’s mouth. 4 Your clothing did not wear out nor did your feet swell all these 40 years.
640–500 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Deuteronomy

Jesus Ben Sira, Sirach 2:1

Deuterocanon · Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus
1 My son, if you come to serve the Lord,
prepare your soul for testing. 2 Set your heart right and endure steadily.
Do not be hasty in a time of disaster. 3 Cling to him, and do not leave him,
so that you may prosper at the end. 4 Accept whatever is brought on you,
and be patient when you suffer humiliation. 5 For gold is tested in the fire,
and people who are acceptable to God in the furnace of humiliation.
195–175 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Jesus Ben Sira, Sirach

References

"... in Sirach 4, it is during this time when Wisdom is not recognized as Wisdom that she subjects her kin to trials and even fear and dread. This should not surprise the pious who were already told in chapter 2 that God subjects the faithful to tests but never abandons them (Sirach 2:1–6). Further, according to Deuteronomy, a key component of the wilderness journey was the testing of Israel by God to see what was in their hearts (Deuteronomy 8:2). Only when their character is sufficiently shaped to be full of wisdom does her presence all along become clear. Should they fail to pass the test and depart from her, even though they do not recognize her presence, she will abandon them to destroyers ..."
Bradley C. Gregory, “Appearance versus Reality and the Personification of Wisdom: Sirach's Place in the Early Jewish Sapiential Tradition,” in Sirach and Its Contexts: The Pursuit of Wisdom and Human Flourishing, ed. Samuel L. Adams, Greg Schmidt Goering, and Matthew J. Goff, JSJSup 196 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 56–73.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Deuteronomy 8:2 and Jesus Ben Sira, Sirach 2:1

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