Anakalypsis / Unveiling the Word
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⚙ Annotations & References ▾
Manuscript witnesses 2 ▾
Codex Sinaiticus Aleph c. AD 330-360 Codex Vaticanus B c. AD 300-325
What is Sirach 28 about?

Ben Sira begins with mercy, teaching that the one who nurses vengeance will meet the Lord's vengeance, while the one who forgives his neighbor will find his own sins pardoned when he prays. He calls the reader to remember the commandments and the covenant and to let anger go. The larger share of the chapter warns against the tongue: its blow crushes bones, its slander has toppled cities and driven out strong households, and happy is the man sheltered from it, so that a man should make a door and bolt for his mouth and weigh his words. Set within Ben Sira's daily instruction, the teaching shows that the fear of the Lord governs the heart's grudges and the mouth's power to destroy.

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 28
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 28

Sirach Chapter 28
28
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What is Sirach 28 about?

Ben Sira begins with mercy, teaching that the one who nurses vengeance will meet the Lord's vengeance, while the one who forgives his neighbor will find his own sins pardoned when he prays. He calls the reader to remember the commandments and the covenant and to let anger go. The larger share of the chapter warns against the tongue: its blow crushes bones, its slander has toppled cities and driven out strong households, and happy is the man sheltered from it, so that a man should make a door and bolt for his mouth and weigh his words. Set within Ben Sira's daily instruction, the teaching shows that the fear of the Lord governs the heart's grudges and the mouth's power to destroy.