“He that is not wise will not be taught, but there is a wisdom that multiplieth bitterness.”
To Jesus Ben Sira we may, I believe, ascribe the following:
“Glorifying God, exalt him as far as your thought can reach, yet you will never attain to his height: praising him, put forth all your powers, be not weary, yet ever will they fall short. Who hath seen him that he can tell us? Who can describe him as he is? Let us still be rejoicing in him, for we shall not search him out: he is great beyond his works.”
This has an interesting correspondence with the beautiful rapture of the Persian Sâdi:
“They who pretend to be informed are ignorant, for they who have known him have not recovered their senses. O thou who towerest above the heights of imagination, thought, or conjecture, surpassing all that has been related, and excelling all that we have heard or read, the banquet is ended, the congregation is dismissed, and life draws to a close, and we still rest in our first encomium of thee!”
To Jesus Ben Sira may be safely ascribed the passages that bear witness to the pressure of problems which, though old, appear in new forms under Hellenic influences. They grow urgent and threaten the foundations of Jahvism. It was no longer sufficient to say that Jahveh rewarded virtue and piety, and punished vice and impiety in this world. Job had demanded the evidence for this, and the centuries had brought none. Job was awarded some recompense in this world, but that happy experience did not attend other virtuous sufferers.
The doctrine of one writer in “Wisdom” is simply predestination. Paul’s potter-and-clay similitude is anticipated, and the Parsi dualism curiously adapted to Jahvist monotheism: “Good is set against evil, life against death, the godly against the sinner and the sinner against the godly: look through all the works of the Most High and there are two and two, one against another.” But the liberal son of Sira is more optimist: “All things are double, one against another, but he hath made nothing imperfect: one thing establisheth the good of another.” Freedom of the will is asserted: “Say not, he hath caused me to err, for he hath no need of the evildoer. He made man from the beginning and left him in the hand of his (own) counsel.... He hath set fire and water before thee, stretch forth thy hand to whichever thou wilt. Before man is the living and the not-living, and whichever he liketh shall be given him.”
But the doctrine of human free agency is pregnant with polemics; it has so been in Christian history, as is proved by the Pelagian, Arminian, Jesuit, and Wesleyan movements. There are indications in Ben Sira’s work that the foundations of Jahvism were threatened by a moral scepticism. His own celebration of the Fathers was enough to bring into dreary contrast the tragedies of his own time and glories of the Past, when “Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and fig-tree, from Dan even to Beer-sheba, all the days of Solomon.” What shelter now in the divine fig-tree, which could bear nothing but legendary or predictive leaves? The curse on the barren tree was near at hand when Jesus Ben Sira uttered his pathetic complaint, veiled in prayer:
“Have mercy on us, O Lord God of all, and regard us! Send thy fear on all the nations that seek thee not; lift thy hand against them, let them see thy power! As thou wast (of old) sanctified in us before them, be thou (now) magnified among them before us; and let them know thee, as we have known thee,—that there is, O God, no God but thou alone! Show new signs, more strange wonders; glorify thy hand and thy right arm, that they may publish thy wondrous works! Raise up indignation, pour out wrath, remove the adversary, destroy the enemy: hasten! remember thy covenant, and let them witness thy wonderful works!”