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Sirach

Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus

About this book

Trust in God During Trials

Chapter 2

1 My son, if you come to serve the Lord, prepare your soul for temptation.⁠ 2 Set your heart aright, constantly endure, and don’t make haste in time of calamity. 3 Cling to him, and don’t depart, that you may be increased at your latter end. 4 Accept whatever is brought upon you, and be patient when you suffer humiliation.⁠ 5 For gold is tried in the fire, and acceptable men 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. 7 All you who fear the Lord, wait for his mercy. Don’t turn aside, lest you 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 old, and see: Who ever put his trust in the Lord, and was ashamed? Or who remained in his fear, and was forsaken? Or who called upon him, and he neglected him? 11 For the Lord is full of compassion and mercy. He forgives sins and saves in time of affliction.⁠ 12 Woe to fearful hearts, to faint hands, and to the sinner who goes two ways! 13 Woe to the faint heart! For it doesn’t believe. Therefore it won’t be defended. 14 Woe to you who have lost your patience! And what will you all do when the Lord visits you? 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 men; for as his majesty is, so also is his mercy.

Texts in conversation

Compare Exodus 34:6 and Sirach 2:11

Hebrew Bible · Deuterocanon

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Summary

Sirach quotes Exodus 34 to ground its view of mercy as a central statement about God’s character. Sirach presents its teaching as a continuation of Israel’s wisdom and theological tradition with the same authority.

Passages

Exodus 34:6

Hebrew Bible
5 The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the Lord by name. 6 The Lord passed by before him and proclaimed: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness, 7 keeping loyal love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. But he by no means leaves the guilty unpunished, responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with children and children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.”
750–400 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Exodus

Sirach 2:11

Deuterocanon · Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus
10 Look at the generations of old, and see: Who ever put his trust in the Lord, and was ashamed? Or who remained in his fear, and was forsaken? Or who called upon him, and he neglected him? 11 For the Lord is full of compassion and mercy. He forgives sins and saves in time of affliction. 12 Woe to fearful hearts, to faint hands, and to the sinner who goes two ways!
195–180 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Sirach

References

"... In the reader-oriented approach, any marker can trigger a connection between texts, and readers are free to pursue any type of intertextual relationship they wish. For example, the theme of fire might induce an interpreter to read the story of “strange fire” in Leviticus 10 with passages about immolating children in the Book of Jeremiah, without implying that the latter borrowed from the former or vice versa ... The author-oriented approach, however, works on the principle that the author has purposely embedded markers in the alluding text, and the reader’s goal is to identify those markers and construe the alluding text in light of the evoked one. Authors have three main options at their disposal for creating such markers: explicit citation, direct allusion, and implicit allusion. (In addition, a text may sometimes employ an unmarked citation, as when Sirach 2:11 quotes Exodus 34:6, or when Sirach 24:23 cites Deuteronomy 33:4) ..."
Geoffrey David Miller, “Methodological Reflections for Future Intertextual Studies,” in Intertextual Explorations in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature, ed. Jeremy Corley and Geoffrey David Miller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 319–343.

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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Exodus 34:6 and Sirach 2:11

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