Samuel L. Adams

Greg Schmidt Goering

Matthew J. Goff

"In Sirach and Its Contexts an international cohort of experts on the book of Sirach locate this second-century BCE Jewish wisdom text in its various contexts: literary, historical, philosophical, textual, cultural, and political. First compiled by a Jewish sage around 185 BCE, this instruction enjoyed a vibrant ongoing reception history through the middle ages up to the present, resulting in a multiform textual tradition as it has been written, rewritten, transmitted, and studied. Sirach was not composed as a book in the modern sense but rather as an ongoing stream of tradition. Heretofore studied largely in confessional settings as part of the Deuterocanonical literature, this volume brings together essays that take a broadly humanistic approach, in order to understand what an ancient wisdom text can teach us about the pursuit of wisdom and human flourishing"--

The Pursuit of Wisdom and Human Flourishing

Sirach and Its Contexts

This monograph interprets the theme of election in the book of Sirach. Previous scholarship has often understood Ben Sira s worldview to be dualistic, and has approached the sage's correlation of Wisdom and Torah as either a nationalization of Wisdom or a universalization of Torah. By probing Ben Sira s ideas about election, this book suggests that Ben Sira does not collapse the traditional sapiential dichotomy wisdom/folly into a dualistic worldview, and that his understanding of the relation between Wisdom and Torah proves to be far more subtle than previous interpretations have allowed. The study demonstrates that the concept of election enables a profitable discussion of the relation of Wisdom and Torah in the thought of this pivotal Second Temple sage.

Ben Sira and the Election of Israel

Wisdom's Root Revealed

Géza G. Xeravits

The papers of the volume investigate how authoritative figures in the Second Temple Period and beyond contributed to forming the Scriptures of Judaism, as well as how these Scriptures shaped ideal figures as authoritative in Early Judaism. The topic of the volume thus reflects Ben Wright’s research, who—especially with his work on Ben Sira, on the Letter of Aristeas, and on various problems of authority in Early Jewish texts—creatively contributed to the study of the formation of Scriptures, and to the understanding of the figures behind these texts.

Greg Schmidt Goering

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