Sirach 36:1
Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus
Deuterocanon
1 Have mercy upon us, O God of all, 2 and put all the nations in fear of you. 3 Lift up your hand against foreign nations and let them see your might. 4 As you have used us to show your holiness to them, so use them to show your glory to us. 5 Then they will know, as we have known, that there is no God but you, O Lord.
Date: 195-175 B.C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
Source
Augustine City of God 17.20
On the City of God Against the Pagans
Patristic
But in Ecclesiasticus the future faith of the nations is predicted in this manner: Have mercy upon us, O God, Ruler of all, and send Your fear upon all the nations: lift up Your hand over the strange nations, and let them see Your power. As You were sanctified in us before them, so be sanctified in them before us, and let them acknowledge You, according as we also have acknowledged You; for there is not a God beside You, O Lord. We see this prophecy in the form of a wish and prayer fulfilled through Jesus Christ. But the things which are not written in the canon of the Jews cannot be quoted against their contradictions with so great validity.
Date: 426 C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
Source
Notes and References
"... Within early Christianity, the Letter of Barnabas echoes Sirach 5:12–14 about the danger of a double tongue, as well as the warning in Sirach 4:31 against an ungenerous attitude (Barnabas 19:7–9). Origen (d. 254 ce) quotes Ben Sira as scriptural when commenting on several Old Testament passages (Genesis 12:5; Joshua 15:6; Jeremiah 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
(pp. 284-305) 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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