In Jerusalem of the early second century, a Jewish teacher, later widely, and simply, known as Ben Sira, wrote, in contemporary Hebrew, a collection of proverbs designed to advise his co-religionists how to express and maintain their Jewishness and values in the face of a dominant Hellenistic culture. His proverbs were later translated into Greek by his grandson. Because the early Church, but not Rabbinic Judaism, included the book in its scriptural canon, the original Hebrew gradually gave way to the Greek, Latin and Syriac versions and was virtually lost in the late medieval and early modern periods. The late nineteenth-century discoveries from the Cairo Genizah restored Hebrew versions of much of the book. Academic use of Ben Sira's work is now greatly facilitated by this scientific polyglot of all four versions, originally planned and initiated by Friedrich V. Reiterer at the University of Salzburg, and now brought to fruition by the painstaking scholarly efforts of Renate Egger-Wenzel, who has also provided a text edition of the Hebrew manuscripts and a guide to the project and to the volume.
