The Covenant within the Covenant: Doctors and Patients in Sirach 38: 1-15
The Wisdom of Ben Sira, also variously known as The Proverbs of Ben Sira, Liber Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiasticus" and Sirach, was probably composed around 180 B.C. 1,2 The text was originally composed in Hebrew (as corroborated by textual evidence from Qumran and other archeological sites), was later translated into Greek and Syriac, and eventually into Latin. 3 While recognized from the very earliest Christian times as divinely inspired, modern Protestants and Jews consider the book Deuterocanonical, or part of the "Apocrypha". It seems certain that it was included in a loose collection of writings considered sacred by 1st century Palestinian Jews. About 100 A.D., however, after the destruction of Jerusalem, the rabbinical community decided to designate a portion of those sacred writings as part of an official canon. This text, which by then had been accepted as divinely inspired by the already distinct Christian community, was excluded from the official Jewish canon. Despite this, Ben Sira is quoted 82 times in the Talmud and related Jewish writings of the first few centuries A.D.4 Even today, Jewish writers in medical ethics-related areas quote Ben Sira.5,6 Although the Roman Church still upholds the canonicity of Ben Sira's book, the leaders of the Protestant Reformation preached a return to the Jewish canon, and excluded Ben Sira's writings from their Bible.7