Anakalypsis / Unveiling the Word
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⚙ Annotations & References ▾
Historic voices 2 ▾
City of God 1× 5 Catechism of the Catholic Church 1× 16
Manuscript witnesses 2 ▾
Codex Sinaiticus Aleph c. AD 330-360 Codex Vaticanus B c. AD 300-325
What is Sirach 27 about?

Buying and selling supply the opening, where Ben Sira observes that sin is wedged tightly between seller and buyer and that the pursuit of wealth easily blinds the eye. As the sieve shakes out the refuse, he says, so a man's reasoning is laid bare when he speaks, and the fear of the Lord proves the difference between the honest and the false. He then warns of the friend who betrays confidence: wounds may be bandaged and quarrels reconciled, but whoever discloses secrets has lost all hope of friendship, and whoever digs a pit will fall into it himself. The chapter carries the book's steady aim, teaching that integrity in trade, speech, and friendship flows from a life that fears the Lord.

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 27
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 27

Sirach Chapter 27
27
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What is Sirach 27 about?

Buying and selling supply the opening, where Ben Sira observes that sin is wedged tightly between seller and buyer and that the pursuit of wealth easily blinds the eye. As the sieve shakes out the refuse, he says, so a man's reasoning is laid bare when he speaks, and the fear of the Lord proves the difference between the honest and the false. He then warns of the friend who betrays confidence: wounds may be bandaged and quarrels reconciled, but whoever discloses secrets has lost all hope of friendship, and whoever digs a pit will fall into it himself. The chapter carries the book's steady aim, teaching that integrity in trade, speech, and friendship flows from a life that fears the Lord.