JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ings by his father David; Tuv-Miẓrayim (1908) gives genealogies
of Egyptian rabbis.
Bibliography: Frumkin-Rivlin, 3 (1929), 307–8.
[Eliyahu Ashtor]
BEN SIRA, ALPHABET OF, a narrative, satirical work,
written probably in the geonic period in the East. The Alphabet
of Ben Sira is one of the earliest, most complicated, and
most sophisticated Hebrew stories written in the Middle Ages.
Four versions of the work have been printed: (a) the usual text
found in most editions and manuscripts, edited with notes by
Steinschneider and published in Berlin in 1858; (b) a fuller version
of part of the work that was discovered by Steinschneider
in a manuscript in Leiden (parts of it were added as notes to
his edition); (c) a totally different version printed by Loewinger
and Friedman from a Kaufmann manuscript in Budapest,
published in Vienna in 1926; and (d) part of a fourth version
discovered by Habermann in a manuscript in Jerusalem
and published in 1958. There are more than 50 extant manuscripts
of the work, in full or in part, many of which contain
different versions and additional stories.
There is no reason to doubt the unity of the work as a
whole, despite the fragmentary character of the different versions.
All the versions share a special, satirical, and even heretical,
character, and this indicates that they all were written
by a single hand. They seem to reflect varying degrees
of censorship on the part of editors and copyists. The complete
work contains four parts. The first part is the biography
of Ben Sira from his conception until the age of one year.
This story, omitted in many editions, explains how Jeremiah,
the prophet, was simultaneously Ben Sira’s father (the numerical
value of Ben Sira’s name equals that of Jeremiah), and
grandfather. Ben Sira’s mother was Jeremiah’s daughter. The
old prophet was forced to an act of onanism by wicked men,
and his daughter conceived from his emissions when she came
to bathe. The form of this story is based on a biblical verse that
tells the glories and wonders of God’s deeds; thus the story
satirizes not only Jeremiah, but God’s deeds as well.
The second part is more sophisticated in form. It tells
how Ben Sira, now one year old, meets with his teacher, who
tries to teach him the alphabet. Instead of repeating each letter
of the alphabet after his teacher, Ben Sira responds with
an epigram beginning with that letter. The epigrams lead the
teacher to tell the story of his life. It may be assumed that the
original structure of this part was 22 + 12 paragraphs, each
containing a letter, an epigram, and a part of the story.
The third part is the longest and contains most of the
narrative material in this work. It recounts the story of Ben
Sira’s life and adventures in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, king
of Babylonia. It also includes stories told by Ben Sira himself
as answers to the king’s questions. These stories often include
pornographic elements, as well as derogatory descriptions
of biblical figures, like King Solomon or Joshua. Some of the
stories in this section contain motifs from international folklore
and may be based on folktales, but they were adapted to
ben sira, alphabet of
the special framework of the work and satirical elements were
added to them. Examination of the various versions indicates
that here, too, there were 22 stories, arranged according to the
letters of the alphabet, to which 12 other stories were added.
The fourth part, which is found in most versions and
gave the work its name, contains 22 alphabetically arranged
epigrams attributed to Ben Sira that serve as material for discussion
and interpretation by Ben Sira’s son, Uzziel, and his
grandson, Joseph b. Uzziel. The contents are satirical and even
heretical. It may be assumed that this part was constructed
in the same manner as the two previous ones – 22 + 12 sections.
The work, therefore, displays elements of unity both in
structure and in its ideological aims. It is all but impossible,
however, to discover the background upon which such a work
could have been written. Some scholars (L. Ginzberg and
others) believe that it aimed at ridiculing the story of Jesus’
birth; but the basis for such a conclusion may be found only
in the first part, and even this is not very clear, for the irony
seems to be directed more against God than against Jesus. It
is hardly possible that the author was a Karaite, as some of
the abusive stories are directed against biblical figures, and
not only against the Talmud and Midrash. It seems likely that
the author did not belong to any organized group or definable
ideological movement, but was merely a writer with an
anarchistic tendency who used satire to ridicule all the institutions
of established religion in his day.
Another difficult problem is the relationship between
this pseudepigraphal work and the original proverbs of Ben
Sira. Some of the proverbs and epigrams included in the work
are originally in the work of Ben Sira, but many such proverbs
are found in talmudic literature, and the author probably
took them from there. The author of the pseudepigraphal
work did not even know Ben Sira’s first name. There is only
one slight connection that might be accidental: the Wisdom
of *Ben Sira has a preface written by the author’s grandson,
who edited the work, and in the pseudepigraphal work the
figure of a grandson is also present.
It is impossible to fix even the approximate date of this
work. It has been suggested that a quotation from the work is
included in the tenth-century Arukh, but this now seems very
doubtful. The Alphabet, however, seems to have been written
in the East after the rise of Islam.
Maimonides and other authorities attacked the work
vigorously, but it was generally accepted as part of the midrashic
tradition, to the extent that a circle of Ashkenazi
ḥasidic mystics in the 12th and 13th centuries attributed some
of their mystical compilations to works and theories received
from Joseph b. Uzziel, who inherited the wisdom of Ben Sira
and Jeremiah. The anarchistic and heretical elements in the
work went unrecognized, probably because of the censorship
exercised by copyists, who prevented the full version from being
known to readers.
Bibliography: M. Steinschneider (ed.), Alpha Betha de-Ben
Sira (1858); D.Z. Friedman and D.S. Loewinger (eds.), Alpha Betha
de-Ben Sira (1926) (= HHY, 10 (1926), 250–81); A.M. Habermann in:
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3 375