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The Grandson of Ben Sira

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2011

Henry J. Cadbury
Henry J. Cadbury
Affiliation:
Pendle Hill, Wallingford, Pa.
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Extract

Users of Bible Translations and especially makers of them have reason to be interested in the grandson of Ben Sira. He is perhaps the earliest identified person of either species. He lived in Egypt twenty-one centuries ago having arrived there, as he tells us, “in the thirty-eighth year under Euergetes the King,” which is probably 132 B.C. That is of course too early to speak of a finished Bible, though he does know the law and the prophets and other books and knows them also in another tongue than Hebrew. It was another Hebrew book—what we call Ecclesiasticus—written by his own grandfather, that he himself translated into Greek. With other translations this was accepted into the Greek and Christian Bible and so has come down to us in the Septuagint, while its original in Hebrew was not ultimately so received in the Hebrew or Jewish Bible.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , October 1955 , pp. 219 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1955

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References

1 Unfortunately the King James version in modern printings omits at the beginning of the Bible the extended address to the reader by the English translators retaining only the brief dedication to the King. It prefixes still another prologue to Ecclesiasticus before the translator's own.

2 That others in the ancient world recognized the inexact equivalence between Greek and a barbarian tongue is shown, as A. D. Nock reminds me, by Corpus Hermeticum xvi.1–2 (in terms very similar to those of the translator's prologue here) and by P. Oxy. 1381. In both cases the original, if not wholly fictitious, would have been Egyptian. For oral translation see H. S. Gehman, The Interpreters of Foreign Languages among the Ancients: a Study Based on Greek and Latin Sources (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1914).

3 Cf. R. Smend, Griechisch-syrisch-hebräischer Index zur Weisheit des Jesus Sirach, 1907. One observes that the translator use είσακούειν frequently, also ϕόβος κυρίου but always νόμος ὺψίσϒου. The combination σὰρξ καὶ αἳμα (14181731) familiar in the New Testament and rabbinic writers is apparently due to the Hebrew.