We start reading this week from the Book of Sirach. The book itself was part of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was the Bible of the early Church. The book was so used for instruction on the part of the early Christians that St. Jerome entitled it Ecclesiasticus, the church book. However, because it was written in Greek, it was not included in the Hebrew Bible and, hence, not the the translation of the Bible into German (since Martin Luther used the Hebrew Bible as the basis of his version) which serves as the pattern for the Protestant Bible. In the nineteenth century a Hebrew version of the Book was found in a Jewish synagouge in Cairo and in the twentieth a portion of the book in Hebrew was discovered at Qumran, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book was originally written in Hebrew and translated into Greek by Ben Sirach’s grandson. As we hear the readings this week we will understand why this was so popular among the first generations of Christians.
