Texts in Conversation
Augustine echoes Sirach's image of a lifetime as a drop of sea water compared to eternity to answer people who ask why God did not create humans sooner, demonstrating how it informed his theology.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Sirach 18:10
Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus
Deuterocanon
8 What is mankind, and what purpose do they serve? What is their good, and what is their evil? 9 The number of man’s days at the most are a hundred years. 10 As a drop of water from the sea, and a pebble from the sand, so are a few years in the day of eternity. 11 For this cause the Lord was patient over them, and poured out his mercy upon them.
Augustine, City of God 12.12
On the City of God Against the Pagans
Early Christian
If it offends them that the time that has elapsed since the creation of man is so short, and his years so few according to our authorities, let them take this into consideration, that nothing that has a limit is long, and that all the ages of time being finite, are very little, or indeed nothing at all, when compared to endless eternity. Consequently, if there had elapsed since the creation of man, I do not say five or six, but even sixty or six hundred thousand years, or sixty times as many, or six hundred or six hundred thousand times as many, or this sum multiplied until it could no longer be expressed in numbers, the same question could still be put, Why was he not made before? For the past and boundless eternity during which God abstained from creating man is so great that, compare it with whatever vast and untold number of ages you please, as long as there is a definite conclusion of this term of time, it is not even as if you compared the minutest drop of water with the ocean that everywhere flows around the globe. For of these two, one indeed is very small, the other incomparably vast, yet both are finite; but that space of time which starts from some beginning, and is limited by some end, whatever its extent, if you compare it with what has no beginning, I do not know whether to say we should count it the very minutest thing, or nothing at all.
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Notes and References
“... Perhaps because Church Fathers made wide use of the Greek and Latin versions of the book, the Hebrew work mostly dropped out of usage in rabbinic Judaism. [...] Within early Christianity, the Letter of Barnabas echoes Sir 5:12–14 about the danger of a double tongue, as well as the warning in Sir 4:31 against an ungenerous attitude (Barn. 19:7–9). Origen (d. 254 ce) quotes Ben Sira as scriptural when commenting on several OT passages (Gen 12:5; Josh 15:6; Jer 16:6). Clement of Alexandria (d. 215 ce) quotes about eighty Sirach verses, while John Chrysostom (d. 407 ce) includes about three hundred citations from the book. Augustine (d. 430 ce) not only cites Sirach about 300x, but also preached sermons on Sirach passages. Rabanus Maurus (d. 856 ce), abbot of Fulda in Germany, composed the earliest surviving Latin commentary on Sirach. ...”
Corley, Jeremy
"Sirach" in Oegema, Gerbern S. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Apocrypha
(p. 300) Oxford University Press, 2021
* 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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