32 ACUMEN • SPRING 2025 ALAMY STOCK PHOTO My favorite is the part that says, if you’re at a banquet and you’re going to throw up, make sure you go outside. Then as now, that’s pretty good advice,” he says. The book also covers philosophical and theological topics. “So, the career advice and these very complex existential questions are all in the same book.” The Wisdom of Ben Sira is also a case study in the kinds of vexations those who study the period have dealt with regularly as an occupational hazard. The book was originally written in Hebrew and translated into Greek by a person who called himself the original author’s grandson. The Hebrew version did not survive fully intact. “Currently, about 70 percent of the book exists in some form of Hebrew, most of it in manuscripts that date up to 1,400 years after the book was written. Whenever you work with this book, you really need to be working with Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Syriac,” Wright says. “I’ve been working through textual notes and translation, and I’m on chapter 17. There are 51 chapters. I’m hoping to finish before I’m dead.” ● of ancient Judaism, Wright says, in part at least because, at that time, the texts were still developing. “Take the book of Jeremiah from the Hebrew Bible. There are at least two or three different versions among the Dead Sea Scrolls. They’re very different, and they exist side by side. It suggests that people knew the differences, used them side by side, and didn’t have any problem with that,” he explains. “I’m teaching my course in early Judaism this semester to go along with the conference, and it’s one of the first things I’ll talk to the students about. They’re going to come into the classroom with this idea that texts are fixed, and it’s simply not the case.” Since the 1980s, Wright has been working on a text called the Wisdom of Ben Sira and is currently writing a commentary on that book with a French colleague. The text is an important example of a wisdom book from the period, instructions on how to live a life. The book of Ben Sira, says Wright, is kind of a training manual for young men who wish to be part of the bureaucracy. “Some of it is career advice. Jesus Ben Sirach, Old Testament, an engraving by German painter Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. It is part of a set of Bible illustrations published in 1860 titled Die Bibel in Bildern.
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