From the discussion in Bab. Sank. 1006 we can infer that the original had been lost by the time of I!ab Joseph {4tli century). This personage couples it with ' foreign literature,' by the reading of which eternal life is forfeited ; and the first passage cited and interpreted quite certainly does not belong to it. It thus appears that the book was already thought of as in the hands of Chris- tians, though originally Jewish. Jerome indeed (about 400) professes to have seen a copy of the original ; as he made no use of it for the correction of the Vetus Itala, his statement is liable to sus-
picion. Jewish writers either know nothing about IJcu-Sira or get their information from Christians. Dcl'ore the hook became Jiart of the inheritance left by the Hellenic and Syrian Jews to the Chris- tians, it ai)pears to have received some additions wliiih are lound in certain (Ireek MS.S and are obelized in the Ilexaplar Syriac. Some of these, e.g. those after 1* and 1", are evidently translated from Hebrew ; and the long pa.ssage that follows 2()'"' in MS 248, which contains most of these addi- tions, seems to be certilied as a translation from the Hebrew by the fact of its occurrence in the Syriac. The SiS cited and .some others occasion- ally exhibit variants which go back to a Hebrew original, e.g. 37-"^ Icrrai for s'^fftrai ; 25^, luopdv for lioiX^v (i.e. nnt') ; 10", where mcpri<pdi>wi' is added to (Ovwv, doubtless an improved renderin" of o-nj. Since it is certain, nevertheless, that iill Greek MSS go back to one copy, if the Hebrew di.sap- peared aliout A.D. 150 these improvements must all have been made before that date, though per- petuated in latt^ MSS.
7. Place in the Christian Church. — The process whereby the literature of the Hellenic and Syrian Jews was appropriated and inherited by Christians is exceedingly obscure. With this question is connected that of the origin of the Peshitta OT, which is now known to lie behind certain passages in the Greek text of the Gospels, whence it appears to be pre-Christian ; just as Christian books of interest were translated into Syriac shortly after their appearance in Christian times, we may sup- pose the same to have been done with Hebrew books in Jewish times. The work of Ben-Sira formed part of the inheritance taken over by the Christian communities from their predecessors ; but, though associated with the canonical books, it failed to obtain admission into the canon ; hence it is found in neither of the canons preserved in the HE of Eusebius, who notices the fact (vi. l.S) that although a.vTi\e-fbp.(vov it is cited by Clement of Alexandria. That various Christian writers should quote it as by Solomon is not surprising. The Latin version is certainly early, and in a curious language, said to be African Latinity ; it appears to have been made from the Greek either directly or indirectly with the help of a copy of the original ; for not only does it exhiliit the chapters in their right order as does the Syriac, whereas in all copies of the Greek there is a seri- ous transposition of chapters in the middle of the work, but in a con-siderable number of cases its renderings are explicable on this supposition. An example has been given above.
The other versions add little or nothing to the criticism of the text ; of the.se the Armenian, Coptic, Ethio))ic, and Syro-Hexaplar are from the Greek, the Arabic from the Syriac.
8. In Islamic literature the name of Ben-Sira ap])ears to lie unknown, but in spite of this his work is perhaps more frequently cited than any other biblii:al book. Thus 30''^ are cited in the Kamil of Mubarrad (i. 45) as the words of 'a sage'; 26. 20 was cited by Malik b. Pinar (t A.H. 123 = A.D. 740) as 'written in the 'Wisdom' (Mikhlat, 49, 16) ; 18-'' is cited by Ghazali (Iliya 'uliim al din, iii. 66) as from the Torali ; 2!l'-' is ascribed to the prophet Muhammad in the Mitsnad of Ibn Hanbal (i. 62) as is 25- in the Sahih of Muslim (i. 41); while 26-' is cited as 'a tradition' by Yaqut (iJirtionary of Learned Men, ed. D. S. Margolionth, London, 1913, i. 15). Early authors, e.g. the poet Abu Nuwaa and the pol3graph Jahiz of Basrah, occasion- ally employ phrases which seem traceable to the book, though there is no suggestion of the source ; thus in the Miser.i of the latter (cd H. van Vloten, Leiden, 1900, p. 99, 12) 'the people call
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SIKACH
miser one whose loaves are few in number ' looks like a reproduction of 34-^ ; it is, however, difli- cult to distinguish in such cases between repro- duction and coincidence, whence it is likely that the verse of Ibn llijjah (Cairo, 1304, p. 96), 'death is sweeter than a bitter life,' is his own, though the words are all but identical with tliose of Sir 30".
9. Re-translations. — Re-translation, in the sense of restoring the lost original, is a difficult task, yet somewhat facilitated by the extreme faithful- ness of the (ireek ; it is further aided by compari- son with the independent Peshitta Syriac, which seems to have followed a mutilated and partly obliterated copy, which it often paraphrased rather than translated. In recent times the task has been attempted by J. L. Wolfsohn (Ben-Zeb), who followed the Syriac, which he supplemented from a German version of the Greek ("Vienna, 1814). A more scholarly re-translation is that of I. Z. Frankel (re-printed Warsaw, 1894, in a complete version of the Apocrypha made from the Greek). Both these works aim at providing a readable rendering for those who are accustomed to read Hebrew rather than at restoring for philological purposes the ipsinsima verba of the original.