Anakalypsis / Unveiling the Word
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⚙ Annotations & References ▾
Historic voices 1 ▾
City of God 1× 7
Manuscript witnesses 2 ▾
Codex Sinaiticus Aleph c. AD 330-360 Codex Vaticanus B c. AD 300-325
What is Sirach 2 about?

Turning to those who would serve God, Ben Sira warns that anyone who comes to the LORD must prepare his soul for testing. He urges steadfastness and trust, comparing the faithful to gold refined in fire and men accepted in the furnace of humiliation, and pronounces woe on timid hearts and slack hands that abandon endurance. Recalling that no one who trusted the LORD was ever put to shame, he counsels that it is better to fall into God's hands than into the hands of men, for His mercy is as great as His majesty. The teaching presses the reader toward a fear of the LORD that holds firm under trial.

Historical backdrop

Ben Sira taught in Jerusalem around 180 BC, in the last calm before the storm. Judea had passed from Ptolemaic to Seleucid hands, Greek ways pressed in from every side, and the second temple still stood in the glory the high priest Simon had restored, the Simon whose splendor the book remembers. Within a generation Antiochus would defile that temple, and the grandson who carried the work to Egypt and turned it into Greek wrote in the aftermath, for the Jews of Alexandria.

The Church Fathers on Sirach 2
Deuterocanon (Catholic & Orthodox) · Accepted as canonical Scripture by the Catholic and Orthodox traditions and included in the original 1611 KJV (between the Old and New Testaments). Not in the Protestant 66-book canon. Read with the same care you bring to other Scripture, conscious that Protestants and Catholics weigh its authority differently.

Sirach 2

Sirach Chapter 2
2
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What is Sirach 2 about?

Turning to those who would serve God, Ben Sira warns that anyone who comes to the LORD must prepare his soul for testing. He urges steadfastness and trust, comparing the faithful to gold refined in fire and men accepted in the furnace of humiliation, and pronounces woe on timid hearts and slack hands that abandon endurance. Recalling that no one who trusted the LORD was ever put to shame, he counsels that it is better to fall into God's hands than into the hands of men, for His mercy is as great as His majesty. The teaching presses the reader toward a fear of the LORD that holds firm under trial.