On 11/17/06, Peter Kirk wrote:Thank you, Yitzhak. Maybe Kraft and Tov were embarrassed by the contents of verse 26; otherwise I can't explain their editorial choice. I assume that the main fragment was available to them before 1994 which is the date of the text I was working from.
Some further thoughts about this: It took a lot of searching, but I did
eventually find the Hebrew text of Sirach online, at
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/text/religion/biblical/parallel/27.Sirach.par.
But unfortunately 25:25,26 seem to be missing, at least from the text
used to prepare this. 25:24 apparently reads M)$H TXLT (WN WBGLLH GW(NW
YXD, understood by the translator into Greek as ἀπὸ γυναικὸς ἀρχὴ
ἁμαρτίας καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὴν ἀποθνῄσκομεν πάντες, literally "From woman
beginning of sin, and through her we die all".
You can look at an image of the Genizah fragment that is used for these verses
here:
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/GOLD/Or1102/AS213_4.html
and at parts of a newly identified Genizah fragment that contains parts of 26:
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/GOLD/Or1102/TS12_867.html
You can see from the first fragment that the gopher site Hebrew text did not
incorporate the newly identified small triangular fragment at the top
left of the
recto. Also that 25:25-26 is missing is not due to any poor quality of the
fragment itself but rather to an editorial choice.
On the face of it it seems wrong to compare a text such as this to one
saying that a husband must not divorce his wife, since the context of 25:26
is a "bad wife" while the context of the second is apparently a general case.
...
It appears to me that if Ben Sira has been left out of the canon in these
cases it was not due to any feministic attitudes. ...
I certainly didn't intend to invalidate everything in the book of Sirach or Ben Sira. I am sure that indeed "/It has a lot of brilliant things to say/". As such I could class it alongside the works of some of the great preachers and theologians of the Christian era, and of the best modern Christian authors. However, many of these also say some things with which I would strongly disagree. And that's OK, I don't expect everyone to agree with me, even in my own time, far less in a remote historical time.
The issue is whether Sirach should be taken as authoritative Scripture, in the way that evangelical Christians take the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments as authoritative. If Sirach were taken in this way, the verse I quoted would have to be taken as a clear commandment, that a man must divorce a disobedient wife, and this teaching would be taken as timelessly valid, without reference to the cultural context ...
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