Inhalt: | List of Illustrations, Figures and Tables -- Abbreviations -- 1 Introduction: Sirach and Its Contexts -- Greg Schmidt Goering -- Part 1: The Wisdom of Ben Sira: Contexts, Categories, and Approaches -- 2 Wisdom as Genre and as Tradition in the Book of Sirach -- John J. Collins -- 3 Wisdom in Transmission: Rethinking Sirach and Proverbs -- Jacqueline Vayntrub -- 4 Appearance versus Reality and the Personification of Wisdom: Sirach's Place in the Early Jewish Sapiential Tradition -- Bradley C. Gregory -- 5 Ben Sira's Tour of the Cosmos: Sir 42:15-43:33 as Ekphrastic Wisdom -- A. Jordan Schmidt -- Part 2: The Hebrew Manuscripts of Sirach: Diversity, Continuity, and Transmission -- 6 Sirach MS C Revisited -- Frank Ueberschaer -- 7 Vav and Yod in the Hebrew Manuscripts A and B of Sirach -- Eric D. Reymond -- 8 Doublets in the Hebrew Manuscript B of Sirach -- Jean-Sébastien Rey -- Part 3: Sages and Their Contexts: Hellenism, Hymns, and Pedagogy -- 9 Where Is Ezra? Ben Sira's Surprising Omission and the Selective Presentation in the Praise of the Ancestors -- Samuel L. Adams -- 10 Sages as Singers in Sirach and the Second Temple Period -- David A. Skelton -- 11 Sirach and Imperial History: A Reassessment -- James K. Aitken -- Part 4: The Reception of the Book and Figure of Ben Sira in Antiquity and the Middle Ages -- 12 Ben Sira's Pseudo-Pseudepigraphy: Idealizations from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages -- Benjamin G. Wright III and Eva Mroczek -- 13 The Act of Reading Ben Sira as a Generative Context for Jewish Liturgical Poetry and the Book of Ben Sira Itself -- Matthew Goff -- 14 Ben Sira in Ethiopia: The Andǝmta Commentary on Sirach 1 and 24 -- Yonatan Binyam -- Index of Ancient Sources -- Index of Modern Authors. 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 |
