By the blessing of the Lord I was the foremost,
and as a grape-gatherer did I fill the winepress.
Sirach, then, was first of all a collector of proverbs, and he found that most of the current wise sayings had been already gathered. It is not likely that up to xxxvi. 22 he merely combined two older books of proverbs (as Ewald supposed[[261]]), though it is more than probable that older proverbs do really lie imbedded in his work. But whether old proverbs or new, Sirach has this special characteristic, that he loves to arrange his material by subjects. This was already noticed by the early scribes,[[262]] and is well brought out by Holtzmann in Bunsen’s Bibelwerk, and I will merely refer to chap. xxii. 1-6, ‘On good and bad children;’ 7-18, ‘The character of the fool;’ 19-26, ‘On friendship;’ 27-xxiii. 6, ‘Prayer and warning against sins of the tongue and lusts of the flesh;’ 7-15, ‘The discipline of the mouth;’ 16-27, ‘On adultery;’ xxix. 1-20, ‘On suretyship;’ 21-28, ‘An independent mode of life.’[[263]] The plan of grouping his material is not indeed thoroughly carried out, but even the attempt marks a progress in the literary art. This is one of the points in which Sirach differs from his canonical predecessors.
In other respects his indebtedness is manifest. Night and day he must have studied his revered models to have attained such insight into the secrets of style. But, so far from affecting originality, he delights in allusions to the older proverbialists. Many parallelisms occur in the sayings on Wisdom (comp. Sir. i. 4, Prov. viii. 22; Sir. i. 14, Prov, i. 4, ix. 10; Sir. iv. 12, 13, Prov. iv. 7, 8; Sir. xxiv. 1, 2, Prov. viii. 1, 2; Sir. xxiv. 3, Prov. ii. 6; Sir. xxiv. 5, Prov. viii. 27). This we might expect; for Wisdom in a large sense is more persistently the object of Sirach than it was at any rate of the earlier writers in Proverbs. But, besides this, points of contact abound in very ordinary sayings. Thus compare, among many others which might be given,
(a) Better a mean man that tills for himself
than he that glorifies himself and has no bread
(Prov. xii. 9, Sept. &c.)
Better he that labours and abounds in all things
than he that glorifies himself and has no bread
(Sir. x. 27, Fritzsche).