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Ecclesiasticus, also known as Sirach or the Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach, is a book of instruction written in Hebrew at Jerusalem around 180 BC and translated into Greek by the author’s grandson in Egypt. Its fifty-one chapters of sayings and poems treat the fear of God, friendship, speech, family life, wealth, the duties of the scribe and the praise of Wisdom, and conclude with a hymn in praise of the famous men of Israel’s history. The Vulgate text is an Old Latin translation which Jerome did not revise.
Sirach is the longest of the wisdom books and was so widely used in the instruction of converts that the Latin Church called it Ecclesiasticus, ‘the church book’. It is deuterocanonical, excluded from the Hebrew Bible and placed among the Apocrypha by Protestants. Its praise of famous men supplied a model for later eulogy, and its sayings were quoted constantly by medieval preachers and in monastic rules. The Old Latin text is longer in places than the Greek and preserves early Christian Latin vocabulary.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from the Lasciva Roma collection of additional Latin texts (edition: Jerome's 405 a.d., Latin Vulgate These files were produced following modern scholarship of the available Vulgate mss. The apocryphal books are prefixed with…), licensed CC BY-NC-SA. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.