POLITICS AN DSOCIETY 31written after the biblical books of the Prophets in that the author reveals his
identity and tells something of himself—a characteristic the boo kshares with
Gree kliterature.^30 Ben Sira had been a government official and had taught
wisdom to the well-to-do youth of Jerusalem. He was a great admirer of the
high priest Simon and was perhaps a priest himself. His boo kconstitutes a
ringing reassertion of the views of the author of Proverbs and of the Deuter-
onomic historian. In what is very likely to be an intentional rejection of the
radicalism of Job and Ecclesiastes, Ben Sira repeatedly emphasizes the tradi-
tional identification of wisdom and fear of the Lord. Like all wisdom writers,
Ben Sira contemplated the meaning of nature. Although for Job nature proved
God’s inscrutability, and for Ecclesiastes it proved the fundamental amorality
of the world, for Ben Sira, as for the Psalmist, nature demonstrates only God’s
majesty. Ben Sira doubts not for a moment that the righteous prosper and, in
an apparent rejection of the views of 1 Enoch, eschews the pursuit of hidden
wisdom. Ben Sira did not react against inner-Jewish developments alone.
Though his own wisdom, like that of Proverbs, is heavily borrowed from Egyp-
tian and perhaps even some Archaic Gree ksources, his insistent identification
of righteousness, or Torah, as the font of all wisdom has been understood as
a reaction against a growing vogue for Gree kliterature among the wealthy
youth of Jerusalem.^31
For all the radicalism of these books, there is little in them that is demonstra-
bly Greek. The Israelite wisdom traditionistransformed in these works but
remains recognizably itself—the books are motivated by traditional Israelite-
Jewish concerns and in every line betray their authors’ familiarity with earlier
Israelite literature. Apparently, Palestinian Jews were not yet composing books
in the Gree klanguage and in Gree kgenres (at least no such wor ks have been
preserved), as their coreligionists in Egypt had already begun to do (though
in content such works were often far more conservative than the more formally
traditional Palestinian books). Although it is overwhelmingly likely that there
is some connection between the intellectual crisis of the priestly and scribal
classes and the new conditions created by Macedonian rule, it is very difficult
to say precisely what this connection may have been. Indeed, the new litera-
ture, except perhaps for Ben Sira, demonstrates that the search in Jewish
sources for Gree kinfluence and native resistance in the form of opposition
to Hellenism is largely misguided. We should be conducting instead a more
subtle search for cultural reorientation.^32
(^30) For an excellent account of Ben Sira, see J. J. Collins,Jewish Wisdom in the Hellenistic Age
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), pp. 42–111. P. McKechnie, “The Career of Joshua
Ben Sira,”JThS51 (2000): 3–26, has now argued that the boo kwas composed in Egypt.
(^31) Hengel,Judaism and Hellenism, 1:138–53.
(^32) This is an approach Martha Himmelfarb attributes (I thin kcorrectly) to Elias Bic kerman;
it has now been adopted by many Hellenistic historians. See M. Himmelfarb, “Elias Bickerman
on Judaism and Hellenism,” inJewish Past Revisited, pp. 199–211.