Ecclesiasticus (Lat., with liber, 'book,' understood; i.e. 'the church-book'), the title which from about the middle of the 4th century came to be applied in the Western Church to a collection of apothegms, whose author calls himself at the close of his book 'Jesus, the son of Sirach, the Jerusalemite.' According to the prologue of the Greek translation, the work was originally composed in Hebrew (not in Aramaic). Jerome testified that he had seen the Hebrew text, no part of which is now extant beyond a number of quotations in the Talmud, and that the original title was Meshalim (Heb., 'apothegms'). In the Greek MSS. the constant title is Sophia ('wisdom,' Heb. Hokmah), the name also used to designate the canonical book of Proverbs. From another statement in the translator's prologue, it can be concluded with certainty that the translator, who was the author's grandson, came to Egypt in the year 132 B.C. The author of Ecclesiasticus may thus have lived and written about 190-170 B.C. In accordance with this is the tribute to the memory of the high-priest Simon, son of Onias (i.e. Simon II., who lived at the beginning of the 2d century B.C.). The earliest Christian writer who expressly quotes the book is Clement of Alexandria, but there are not a few probable indications that it was known to the writer of the epistle of James (cf. e.g. James, i. 19 with Eccles. v. 11). No definite plan can be traced in the arrangement of this collection of aphorisms, which was doubtless composed piecemeal. But there is a moral unity of motive throughout. The son of Sirach everywhere teaches that man's true wisdom is the fear of God and the keeping of his commandments, though here and there his zeal in applying his teaching of wisdom to every least detail of human life leads him to inculcate petty, homely rules of prudence not without a savour of utilitarianism. We owe the preservation of the book to the pious desire of the author's grandson to recommend the theology of Palestine to the Jews of Alexandria, who in return inserted it in the Greek Bible. 'That it did not find a place,' says Fritzsche, 'among the canonical Scriptures was probably owing to its late origin, and the fact that it was not anonymous, or rather, that it did not appear under an ancient and venerable name, like the somewhat later book of Daniel, but under that of its real author.' From the end of the 2d century downwards Ecclesiasticus was regarded as an edifying book, and it was not till the Council of Trent pronounced it to be canonical that Protestant orthodoxy discovered those signs of spiritual deficiency of which most of the Reformers seem to have been unaware. Bunyan, in his Grace Abounding, tells that after being 'greatly enlightened and encouraged' by the text Eccles. ii. 10, it 'did somewhat daunt' him to find it in the Apocrypha, yet he considered it was his 'duty to take the comfort of it.' The noble 'Hymn of the Forefathers' at the conclusion of the book is familiar to our ears from the words read on founders' days and sung in Handel's Funeral Anthem.
The best commentary is that of Fritzsche (1859). See also Bruch, Weisheitslehre der Hebräer (1851); Horowitz, Das Buch Jesus Sirach (Breslau, 1865); Merguet, Die Glaubens- und Sittentlehre des Buches Jesus Sirach (Königsberg, 1874); Seligmann, Das Buch der Weisheit des Jesus Sirachs (1883); Schürer's Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ (trans. 1886); Margoliouth, The Place of Ecclesiasticus in Semitic Literature (1890).