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Book of Proverbs. Some scholars feel that Ben Sira was banned from the Jewish biblical canon only because of its late date or the fact that its author was known so specifically, as a particular figure from their own not-too-distant past. Though it may once have been considered a member in good standing of Israel’s company of sacred writings, by the time the rabbis fixed the canon and decided what was in and what was out, Ben Sira found itself among the “outs,” and along with the other “external books”—as the apocryphal writings are known in Hebrew—its study was proscribed in Judaism. Eventually the Hebrew original vanished altogether, though passages from it continued to be quoted and have left their mark on someof the prayers regularly recited by Jews today (even if most are unaware of it). Passages from the book are likewise found in the two Talmuds and other central rabbinic texts, where they are sometimes introduced with the formula “it is written”—a phrase usually reserved for quotations from scripture.
    Scholarly interest apart, one is tempted to say that it was Schechter’s developed literary sensibility that pulled him almost uncontrollably toward this lost valley of Hebrew letters—a path leading from the later poetry of the Bible to the next conspicuous stage in the history of Hebrew verse, the hymns and prayers of the fifth through eighth centuries. “Ben Sira,” he remarked, “should rather be described as the first of the Paitanim [liturgical poets] than as one of the last of the canonical writers.” It is, though, by no means clear that he intended this as a compliment, as Schechter seems to have had decidedly mixed feelings about the value of that later hymnography. In addition, like most scholars, he noted the derivative and pastiche-like quality of the Ben Sira text, which a Cambridge friend and colleague called “a tissue of old classical phrases,” and which another scholar has described only a bit more generously as an attempt “to adapt the older Scriptures in order to popularize them and make them relevant to the new Hellenistic age in which [Ben Sira] lived.” Still other modern writers are more blunt in their assessment of Ben Sira’s limitations: “Polonius without Shakespeare,” says one, suggesting that Ben Sira’s wisdom is passed on without panache or anything in the way of a style that might make it memorable. Numerous commentators have found the work “tedious,” and one Jewish biblical scholar has said that the Hebrew of the section identified by Schechter is “composed in an idiom which is for the most part hideous.”
    On the other hand, the American-Jewish classicist Moses Hadas called Ecclesiasticus “the most attractive book in the Apocrypha,” adding that “it can be read almost as an essay of Montaigne is read.” More than just an extender of scriptural tradition, Ben Sira’s author is, says one leading Israeli Semiticist, a self-conscious, skillful, and at times even virtuosoartist whose work introduces to Hebrew notions that develop into pivotal concepts and terms in rabbinic literature (the immanence of God, for example, which later in the tradition becomes the Shekhina). The book is, he says, brimming with treasures ( genazim ).
    Whatever reservations Schechter himself had about the epigonic nature of some of the writing, when Ben Sira the poet hit his stride, the results, he felt, rang a large literary gong: “The chapters containing the praise of wisdom and the praise of holy men,” he wrote, “are unsurpassed in beauty of diction and grandeur of thought.” He no doubt had in mind the book’s opening lines—
All wisdom comes from the Lord
and is with Him forever.
Who can number the sands of the sea,
and the drops of rain, and the days of eternity? …
Who can find out the height of heaven,
and the breadth of the earth, and the deep, and wisdom? …
    and the passage midway through the book when Wisdom speaks in praise of herself:
I came