Gibberish?

Although the second colon of Sir 4:14 is often described as gibberish, one can in fact make sense of the letters and postulate a reading that accords with various orthographic tendencies in the Hebrew Ben Sira manuscript commonly labelled Ms A (T-S 12.863). The new assessment of the orthography and spelling suggests the contextually relevant sense “and God is with those who desire her.” The frequent description of the colon as non-sense derives, in part, from a reliance on printed editions of the text (by contrast to its form in the manuscript) as well as on a tendency to avoid looking for the sense of the words in the manuscript at hand in favor of postulating an “original” text.